Afterimages of Diadamia

Quite simply, I learned 3D modeling because of this book (which I bought on Google Play Books, yessir).  I love to see places and things described in novels as they appeared according to the author's own vision.  Even when the places are based upon real places, when the two are merged simply but well, it has a way of bringing the story to life.  Even if the story has supernatural elements to it.

When I saw the 3D models of Depot Street, the car, and other things that had been settings in these two novels, it appealed to my fascination with seeing the world of the novels the way the authors envisioned them.  I'm still tinkering with 3D models of characters but have found that rendering can really give life to sketches, to 3D models, in a way that brings the story to life.  It's like watching a film well adapted from a novel or story.  Some filmmakers try to remain true to the story while telling it in a different way and others might as well have just come up with their own version.  My preference is for the latter category, but I will still look for little gems that survived intact from page to screen.

Some renders are already shown under Fiction Novels and Fan Art, but let's take a closer look at what I mean when I say "render".  It's what I'm going for when I try to imagine from the page to whatever screen I'm looking at what picture the words are creating...

Rendering a Legend

The whimsical part could also be a nod to the character Diadamia played at the amusement park she worked at, "Fearless Penelope".  Now there is an interesting story!  The ride Diadamia plays this character on, the Dream Traveler, seems to have been inspired by an actual ride that existed at Coney Island's Luna Park in the early 20th century, A Trip to the Moon.  

For some reason, I've been fascinated with this cover.  For some reason, I've always wanted to see what she would look like, this wraith in a 1920's aviator outfit and a very unique car, if the proportions were made correct.  Maybe I'll give her that ghostly pallor next...

Not In My Cemetery

The guy apparently has the creepiest eyes, ones that would make me floor the gas pedal and cuss myself out for being crazy enough to stop for the scariest hitchhiker when I otherwise refuse to pick up ANY hitchhikers.

Of course, this ghostly hitchhiker has another well-known trick: suddenly appearing right in the middle of the road when a driver has no time to stop.  The vehicle would have to have struck anyone standing there at that moment and yet, no thump, no evidence of impact, no victim anywhere.  When a driver gets out of their vehicle, it isn't uncommon to hear spectral laughter, creepy and not funny at all, filling the air.

There is one other thing this specter has been known to do: mess with car radios.

Similarly, it is through a car radio that the Amethyst Hill Ghost first announces herself to readers.  Eleven Hits at Eleven (uh oh) suddenly gets weak, scratching out and being replaced by something else: a voice.  A distant female voice, cold as the iceberg hit by the Titanic, admonishing the young couple who must have taken a wrong turn on their way to Lovers' Lane: "Not in my cemetery."

Chemical compounds and even oil from human skin have been known to cause gravestones to deteriorate, or for deterioration to accelerate.

What happens when someone rubs a gravestone on a grave or in a cemetery known to be haunted?  People have claimed that the paper would disintegrate, and descriptions have included the paper somehow slicing itself precisely into sections.  Supposedly, it happens without the person rubbing the gravestone realizing it.  

One that seemed to have been based on the epitaph on her headstone: "I am waiting and watching for you".

Which proves nothing.

And Nellie Vaughan's grave isn't the only one with a headstone that, according to lore, have somehow caused paper to slice itself into sections.  There is another urban legend involving images of gravestones, though.  Taking photographs of them and finding puzzling results.

Puzzling as in the photo shows some sort of gauzy, curtainlike shield over the camera lens that obscures the headstone from view.  An effect that also appears in the negative of the photo.  One famous grave has stories of this type of shielding, that of a young starlet named Virginia Rappe.

Accounts of what happened next vary, but everyone's favorite version (and likely untrue) was that Arbuckle had assaulted Rappe in a bedroom of the hotel suite the party was being held in.  To keep things graphically interesting, accounts often include Arbuckle using a wine bottle on Rappe, which led to the bladder perforation that ultimately killed her.

Many believe a more likely theory, that Virginia Rappe had had an abortion (this happened at that time far more than people might realize) and the abortionist had accidentally punctured and/or perforated Rappe's bladder.  When Rappe attended the party and began consuming alcohol, her body did what bodies do when there is alcohol consumption.  Specifically, organs like her kidneys.  Filtered it out, which results in urine filling the bladder.  Lots of it.

Fatty Arbuckle was tried repeatedly before being acquitted.  The acquittal came with an apology from the jury that acquitted him.  The damage to Arbuckle's career, unfortunately, was done.  And permanent.  Arbuckle died in the 1930s and today is remembered more for what happened in a San Francisco hotel suite in 1921 than for his film career.

To this day, Virginia Rappe's grave in Hollywood Forever Cemetery is believed to be haunted by her troubled spirit.  

People have claimed to hear sobbing not at, but in Rappe's grave.  As if the sobs are coming from inside her casket, the sound filtering up through the earth to the surface for the living to hear.  There are the usual random accounts of seeing a woman resembling Rappe in the area where her grave is located.  At least one account describes people having a feeling usually described as "uneasy" around Rappe's grave if they are near it around dusk.  Possibly even "hostile".

The reason for the negativity is usually assumed to be because Virginia Rappe never had justice for her murder.  However, this assumes the manner of death actually was homicide.  If the death was not murder, or even manslaughter, but the result of accidental damage during a medical procedure (legal or otherwise), the negative energy around her grave would need a different reason.

Such as how horrifically Virginia Rappe's reputation was trashed in the wake of her death.  Murder victims who never got justice, one account warned, can be angry and vindictive, so care must be taken around where they haunt, especially their graves.  Why?  Because their anger might include the desire for revenge, and they will take it out on whoever happens to be around given the right opportunity.

Which in turn paints the murder victim in a negative light because now, the victim is the one to be feared.  

Even that, I would imagine, can anger a ghost regardless of the cause and manner of their death.

All the surrounding, conflicting details of someone's life and death naturally become more so when it is high profile.  Many who seek out famous stories like this might not...watch what they say.  So, when someone in the present day shows up at Virginia Rappe's grave to take photos of it and makes insensitive comments, I suppose that's one way to explain why the photos came out looking as if some gauzy curtainlike shield seemed to be covering the camera lens.

Fortunately, the photographer's apology for unkind comments seemed to have calmed things down.

But what if paper splitting and distorted images happen for no apparent reason?  Not even technical glitches?  

One character, probably the only one in the novel that appears directly in both timelines, described this very situation in an incident that occurred in the 1940's.  By then, Good Frikkin' Deal--I mean Grady F. Driscoll--recounted in 2005, there were already multiple stories about Diadamia's ghost and her grave.  So, his wife and daughter went up to the cemetery to try to make some gravestone rubbings.  The paper split mysteriously, a phenomenon that occurred when Lydia tried it in 2005.

After being nudged repeatedly by someone who could not be seen, Mrs. Driscoll and her daughter fled the cemetery and never again went there in their lives.  But Grady did.  He had been experimenting with photography then, so in the 1940's, this meant the camera was a manual camera that used film, negatives.  When he took photos of Diadamia's granite gravestone, he got that gauzy curtainlike shield obscuring the lens.

In 2005, this seemed to translate into the fresh batteries in Lydia's camera suddenly draining completely when she entered the cemetery and tried to take photos of Diadamia's grave.  In Lydia's case, there is animosity, but she does not yet know this, let alone where Diadamia's animosity is coming from.

And yet, nothing points to Grady F. Driscoll having gotten on Diadamia's bad side.  Other characters who recount their encounters with the Amethyst Hill Ghost also do not seem to have personally done anything that would have stuck in Diadamia's craw, but they experienced her terrifying ghost decades after her death.

Most people who make gravestone rubbings do so for historical purposes, especially when the history is well known.  A significant number make gravestone rubbings and take photographs of graves for the same reasons.  How do we explain things like paper slicing itself into precise sections without notice or gauzy curtains suddenly appearing over the camera lens to the point that the negative also includes this anomaly that should be impossible?

The Paxxton

Not a single other car with a grill like that.  It looks like it could have been pulled from a locomotive engine, one of those that was designed to nudge cattle off the tracks.  The name "Paxxton" has no origin in the novel, and the novel is the only place I've ever found mention of a car with this name. 

The car was described as looking like some sort of antique racing car, designed to "look fast even when standing still".  That would imply the car was built for speed.  And perhaps it was.  A car like that would certainly stand out in traffic in any era.  

This is actually known as an "angel number" or a spiritual sign that someone is watching over you, to put it simply.  Around here, it means things might not be complete on a page, but things are under way.  It is a positive sign, not a negative one.

Or maybe that depends upon perspective.

In the novel, The Legend of Diadamia, the character Diadamia used 11 11 in life to signal her presence or leave a message for the young man she loved, Cordell Spenceton.  In death, she more or less used it for the same thing.  But why would she have needed to leave a "code" for her young man?  Why not just go to the front door of his house and knock?  Why not just identify herself by name when she placed a telephone call for him at the mill his family owned and operated?

Well, let's go back to the mill his family owned and operated.

Here's what, to my recollection, HBO's The Gilded Age didn't happen to mention.  While it is true that many society families from New York City and other major cities had what are charmingly referred to as "summer homes" in Newport, Rhode Island, it is also true that other places in Rhode Island had their own "society families".  

Across the state, mill villages such as the fictional Amethyst Hill were established by textile mills and the families who owned and operated them.  In the story, there is a part where Lydia Gwyndorra takes a self-guided tour on foot of this little village of Amethyst Hill, beginning at the abandoned railyard next to the old depot she had bought and converted into her coffee shop.  As she walked, she passed a neighborhood of multi-family housing that had once been owned and operated by the family whose textile mill had once dominated the village: the Spencetons.

In mill villages, the owners of the textile mills also owned housing for families of mill workers and business establishments like general stores for mill workers' basic needs.  And mill workers were very much the working class of society.  Mill owners, who also owned much of the rest of the village, were typically the ones whose families had the wealth and thus became the "society" in these villages.  And while there were certainly other "society" families, they didn't always include the mill workers who sometimes lived in single-family homes due to their positions in the mills.  Supervisors, foremen, that sort of thing.

In the story, Diadamia lived in a bungalow with her widowed father until his death.  Her aunt, whose precise residence was never clarified, apparently was able to arrange for Diadamia to begin work at the mill owned by the Spencetons.  The job was at the mill's looms, which by all accounts could be extremely dangerous.  Diadamia's father had already been employed at the same mill for many years as a sheet metal fabricator.

Not only was Diadamia not a member of the class of society the Spencetons were and had been for at least two generations by the late 1920's, but sons of society families being groomed to take over just were not supposed to look for marriage material among any of the "working class", let alone employees.  Perhaps during childhood, it was different if all the children in the mill village attended the same school, but when they reached adulthood, the social rules took hold.

Another issue was...well, there is just no way to say this delicately.  Ethnic background.

A relative of Mercy Brown, Rhode Island's so-called "Last Vampire", indicated that he had grown up in roughly the same time period Diadamia had been alive, and the time period immediately following her death.  Growing up in or around Exeter, he noted that in his own family was a close relative of Native American ancestry.  BUT.  One just did not disclose this fact about their family in that time period.  Right or wrong, it was an unfortunate staple of social attitudes towards Native Americans.

Diadamia was a character who just did not care what others thought of her own Native American heritage through her deceased mother, not even the Spencetons.  

Although Diadamia and her young man, Cordell Spenceton, were seen together in Westerly by one of Cordell Spenceton's mother's society friends and reported the sighting to Mrs. Spenceton by describing Diadamia as "that Indian girl", Diadamia had a different idea of why Mrs. Spenceton did not want her son consorting with her.

This is a bit of a departure from social norms of the time, one would think.  Diadamia and Cordell had known each other since they were young children attending the same school together.  Even though his family owned the mill her father was employed at, the two were childhood playmates.  During a game of "Cowboys and Indians" the two played on the grounds of the Spenceton mansion when Diadamia was about twelve and Cordell about fourteen, they shared their first kiss.  

And were caught by Mrs. Spenceton.

Predictably, Mrs. Spenceton was most decidedly displeased by this show of future potential, but what parent isn't at least a little rattled to see signs of their children beginning to grow up?  In particular, to begin to show romantic interest in others?  In the early 20th century, though, catching a first kiss like that was unlikely to go over as anything more pleasant than a turd in a punch bowl.  Diadamia, though, had confronted Mrs. Spenceton in such a way that when Diadamia's father found out about the confrontation, he, afraid of losing his job at the mill owned by the Spencetons (also a legitimate worry), marched Diadamia up to the Spenceton mansion to apologize to Mrs. Spenceton.

Diadamia's father kept his job and Diadamia later went to work in the mill herself for a time, but it all came down to one unfortunate circumstance that drives the plot of the story.

Diadamia and Cordell Spenceton had to keep their romance a secret.

So, in order to give Cordell a sort of "code", a specific and unmistakable means of determining when it was Diadamia contacting him or just letting him know she was near, was thinking of him, she used 11 11.  I am not sure if the spiritual significance of 11 11 was known of in the 1920's, but it would be by Lydia's time.  In order to bridge this gap, 11 11 became the month and day of Diadamia's birth.

Could 11 11 also be a spiritual way of trying to alert someone that something is wrong and they need to find out what it is?

Perhaps.

Because in the weeks right before someone I love was diagnosed with cancer (they beat it), I saw 11 11 EVERYWHERE.  It only slowed down after we got to the ER and admission to the hospital.  It never came with the sense that it was meant to cause harm but was trying to tell me something important.  One of which was confirming the sense I had that something was very wrong.  That something turned out to be the kind of "very wrong" that cancer falls under.

Would I have known 11 11 was a thing if I had not read this novel?  If I had not done some searching to see if 11 11 had any particular meaning?  No.