It is that time of year again — all through the month (October) prior to All Hallows Eve and especially if you are a Celt or some kinda creature, celebrate! With many a big inflatable spectacular spook and even more smaller signs on businesses, making light of those who have passed in the night.
And many an event to mark those days!
The official season set off with a bang in Hudson, sorta as this prior event was for the little kiddies and had that kinda boring trick or treating vibe, as the Rotary Clubs, largely it seems a bunch of old guys sitting around a group of coffee tables, had their gotta-be-a-child-or-parent-or guardian-or-significant-other costume parade last week.
What follows is for the rest of us.
Rivertown Tattoo in the downtown of Hudson and on the east and south side, and that might be the scary side(s) and see later on about that, is having their grand opening — thus blatant plug — on Saturday, Oct. 25 through most of the evening and before and aft, with their own costume contest, and prizes, and even super cheap flash tattoos. Go and attend and see what that encompasses, and is that a sorta evil word?
— Some people out on a promising pre-Halloween Friday night-out in downtown Hudson looked a bit flapper familiar, and then it became known that it was either pre- or post-prohibition night party time — either will work — originating from The Bluffline Caves, as long as it is not based on inhibition.
Meanwhile, as I again saw crews of workers removing late night trash from the back of the riverside Pier 500 restaurant, while walking down the alleyway, it was a reminder why we’ve had so much ICE in our town. So many such frost-gathering big restaurantier types in our now bustling, former sleep old river town.
Meanwhile, over in New Richmond’s downtown scene, to be seen were a power trio of skeletons in an electronics store, with electric tape a depiction of such spooky little girls like you, in storefront windows. One more, a graveyard scene in a fast-food window that was a legitimate, painting-style, work of art, drawn as a gray sketching.
Back to the Beginning, with the fitting amount or dose of adrenaline, or should I say Adderall, it just seemed fitting that I would go home and immediately review the song Ace Of Spades. —
And there will be a band playing on, and they just sound creepy, The Grim Lot. Is that hinging on death metal? Anyway, when I get through with my daylight-being-a-vampire siesta or such, I will likely put more of their bio at the end on this article.
The after-party is down a block or two at Ziggy’s, and that is where we bring in the scary side of street debate. More to the point, I have/had been looking for space to insert (another scary word?) a story to chill the bone, about a thing that I heard, many years ago. The bartender behind that very bar, before they were a music club, became a friend of mine and told me he’d lived with some buddies up nord in Duluth, when he was going to THAT college, in a house at which many decades ago — and this by the way is nothing to joke about — there had lived at least one of the men who had suffered a very premature death. That was when in an event that is well known but should be even more well known, especially the way things are going these days, he being black was one of those who’d been the victim of a very famous lynching. One of the more prominent ones you hear of in that vernacular. So by the way, may he rest in peace, and I wish his time on earth had been longer and more pleasant.
Anyway, word has it that the ghost of this man, and maybe another or two, still lingered in the house when the bartender had lived there, and there were occasionally some strange goings on …
I at one point told this story to my mom, and she scoffed. But another one who believes in these types of things and had been a co-worker and by the way had once walked through a very scary graveyard, and still slaves away at a bar up and across the street, told me a very similar story the other day about another ghost said to be one of the many who haunt many a venue downtown.
Mom did point out — I think it was she — that there is a Lutheran church in her neighborhood that was having a celebration of both All Souls and All Saints days on the same night, right associated with Halloween. Now how Celt is that …
But again anyway, this is a way to recycle that which started a month before Halloween to lead up to our current hallowed haunts.
We are talking dinosaurish skeletons riding bicycles at the bike shop just down from where I live. One of the boney creatures at that store that just happens to have a couple of cats creeping around and sleeping near the window and drawing gazes from passersby, looks pretty pre-Cambrian on its crotch rocket, as in a very toothy tiger as in saber. Is it any coincidence that one of the poor kiddies has not been seen for a while, and I miss her, and wonder if she has left this world? And maybe now reappeared?
And now finally appears that bio for The Grim Lot, which I say is eclectic in the best possible way, with great variety in their shows and who they play with and their styles, and one of the singers often exudes Beetlejuice vibes in a visual way, fitting for this holiday. I’ll let them say it: “Grim Lot is a six piece alternative rock band based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They play a brand of dark, experimental music rooted in and eschewing tradition. Familiar, yet completely their own.
“Featuring ex-members of Dead Bundy (cool as in cold) and The Neat Neat Neats, The Drug Budget, Vernon Wayne, Reaping Asmodeia, and Ghost Bath, (cool again), the band played their first shows in late 2023.
“In 2024 the band hit the ground running with plans to release new music every month, and a full calendar of live performances.” Not your usual Hudson music.
Awash amidst the afterglow of the tattoo shop grand opening, as the ribbon cutting was at 11 a.m., there were mad monastical medievel-style monks, mostly, running amok in the downtown and mingling, as the last main prelude to Halloween itself.