Artist and Halloween fanatic Eddie Allen was inspired by the Haunted Mansion’s morphing paintings to try his hand at creating the effect with antique photos. Now his lenticular images can been seen in Hollywood’s Magic Castle and NYC’s Jekyll and Hyde restaurant. You can also buy his prints on his Haunted Memories Web site, starting at $15 for a 5 x 7.

Or you can just browse the site and enjoy the tongue-in-mouldering-cheek captions Allen has written for each of his characters. For Uncle Charles, shown here: “Uncle Charles was not very well-liked by people. Isolated and bitter, by nightfall he was often found to be in a rotten mood …” Bwahahahaaaa!

Probably the biggest influence on my aesthetic, the original haunted house of my childhood, was my late grandmother’s sprawling Victorian mansion in New Jersey. The house was filled with hidden doors, secret staircases, dark alcoves and flitting shadows — it scared the crap out of me.

One of the creepiest things about it was the collection of morally heavy-handed illusion prints my grandmother had hanging in her sitting room. “All is Vanity” (above) is the one I remember best, although more examples follow after the jump. “Vanity” is by American illustrator Charles Allan Gilbert (1873-1929) and prints can be found at Sandlot Science for 20 bucks.

Some other prints my grandmother had, all also available at “illusion gift store” Sandlot Science:

“Society” by George A. Wotherspoon. Per Sandlot Science: “Is it a dandy dressed to the nines, or do you see a well-dressed jackass between the two ladies?”

Another Wotherspoon, ominously titled “Gossip, and Satan Came Also.” “Is it a pair of Victorian lady gossips, or is that Satan himself lurking in the background?”

My grandmother also had a print with a man’s head in profile composed entirely of naked women, and a row of skulls with a caption that read something like, “Beggars and kings, in death all are equal.” I’ll post those as I track them down.

I am thoroughly charmed by the story in today’s New York Times about a young couple who bought a fantastically dilapidated 1896 stone mansion in the middle of the Bronx.

In addition to the gorgeous photos (see the slideshow here), I love the couple’s attitude: They fell in love, not just with the house’s potential, but with its history, listening to the stories told by the 91-year-old owner (“People sometimes knock on the door, Mr. Evers warned them, asking to see inside. ‘I would say it is not a museum, this is my home,” he said. “Kids used to think the house was haunted, and I never discouraged that’ “).

The couple are not just infatuated, but committed. “In terms of creating an inheritance and a legacy, and building a family around something, this would be it,” the wife says. “We would never, ever leave this house.”

They’ve also got an appealingly realistic attitude toward the work that will be involved in the house’s care and maintenance: “Renovation and restoration, including redoing all the wiring and plumbing, will cost at least $200,000, according to estimates, though the Deanses expect to go way over budget. They hope to move in in the spring, but finishing the house ‘will probably take us the rest of our lives,’ Mrs. Deans said.”

Somehow this whole steampunk thing had escaped me until recently — as a phenomenon if not an aesthetic. I’ve been a fan of Victorian futurism for years, and had a friend who really was steampunk before steampunk existed. The style, I think, is sort of a boy version of what I’m going for with ostrichclaw — with an emphasis on technology and the fantastic in place of the domestic and macabre.

So after much thought I determined that it’s off-topic for o.c., but since this blog functions partly (er, primarily) as a personal bibliography of things that interest me, i’ve compiled a set of links to things that are either explicity steampunk or in my mind evocative of the s.p. worldview. More after the jump.

Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum

Joel-Peter Witkin

City of Lost Children

L.A.’s Museum of Jurassic Technology

Great U.K. steampunk blog Brass Goggles

Many Dead Things blog by “steampunk cryptozoological assemblage artist” AlexCF

Stephane Halleux

Self-proclaimed “eccentric genius” Kaden Harris

Japanese s.p. watchmaker Haruo Suekichi (via Watchismo)

ApartmentTherapy has this Marcel Wanders’ Zeppelin lamp, which it describes as “designed to look like it had cobwebs all over it.” Readers’ takes range from “very Edward Gorey haunted house” (I’ll be the judge of that!) and “creepy and macabre” to “fetish-inspired” to “it looks like a sea urchin” (ummm…). I like anything that makes people stop and work to classify it, but to me, it’s not cobweb-y enough! Let’s see some strands, some tatters, some mummified moth carcasses! Creepy and macabre indeed!

In “time” (heh) for Halloween, Watchismo has posted several images of the silver skull watch owned by Mary Queen of Scots. “The case is opened by dropping the under jaw, which turns upon a hinge, while the watchworks occupy the place of the brain,” he explains. Check out the rest of the memento mori posts, including the hilarious (in my opinion) antique rotating eyeball skull clocks. Timepieces, looked at morbidly, count down the seconds of our lives and are thus a constant reminder of our mortality. Tick tock …

More pics after the jump.

“The skull is of silver gilt and is engraved with lines of Horace, figures of Death with his scythe and hourglass, Adam and Eve, and the Crucifixion. The lower part of the skull is pierced to emit the sound when it strikes.” (Watchismo)

Day of the Dead is off-topic here, but I can’t resist giving a nod to my creepy counterparts south of the border. And the best site I’ve found for D.O.D. paraphernalia is the aptly named MexicanSugarSkull.com, which features, among many fabulous things, the above painted clay novios (literally “sweethearts”) cake toppers ($16). Yet another reason to do our wedding over again, goth-tastic style.

Oh my god. I just found my new favorite Web site. PushinDaisies.com (no relation to the TV show of a similar name) is supposedly “owned and operated in Allenhurst, NJ, by a licensed funeral director Catherine, aka Cadaver Cat.” It’s also the self-proclaimed “coolest mortuary novelty shop on the Internet,” and who am I to argue? (There are others?) In any case, you can find everything from a do-it-yourself embalming kit ($5.95) to hearse earrings ($9.95) to the above dozen dead roses ($26.95), for your first date with your future corpse bride.

After the jump, the perfect lawn accessory for a haunted house … or haunted trailer, as the case may be.

Skel-E-Flamingos ($16.95)

Look. I’m going to give it to you straight. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been a little skull-crazy lately. I realize that skulls, as a motif, are kinda played and can easily slip into kitsch and/or Hot Topic territory. But blame it on Halloween or whatever, there’s just been a lot of cool skull stuff around recently and I’m posting it all at once. So bear with me. If, however, you’re all about this kind of thing, then hurry up and bookmark the Skull-A-Day blog. I love a blog with a singularity of purpose, one that’s expressed succinctly in its name, and to that end this blog is up there with my other (off-topic) fave, KnuckleTattoos.com.