Tag Archives: Halloween season

Balladeer’s Blog’s month-long celebration of Halloween continues with this look at a variety of forgotten or neglected horror legends from American lore.

THE RED GNOME OF DETROIT – A supernatural figure that was once a servant of the Native American deity Glooskap. When the Red Gnome’s efforts to drive off the increasing numbers of newly-arrived Europeans failed it settled in to torment the newcomers whenever it could.

The Red Gnome preyed on the Cadillac family, British and American military units and on romantic couples consisting of any Native Americans and white-skinned people. Fires, drownings and all-out massacres have been laid at the door of this malevolent entity. FOR THE FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE 

THE CORPSE-SMITH OF CONNECTICUT – Also called the Cadaver Master and the Carrion Engineer this mad scientist of Eastern European descent was the cause of the many vanished graveyards from Connecticut’s past. The Corpse-Smith scandalized 1770s America with his brilliant but macabre uses for every single resource he could possibly harvest from the bodies of the recently deceased.

Eventually the deranged genius was driven (literally) underground, where he set up a subterranean laboratory beneath the first of the Connecticut cemeteries he would plunder. The Corpse-Smith and the mechanical servants he created from human remains hollowed out a labyrinthine tunnel network that facilitated their grave-robbing efforts and their increasingly macabre experiments. Gravediggers and sextants feared the Corpse-Smith, who often hungered for fresher meat than he was used to. FOR THE FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE Continue reading →