A photo essay.
It’s hard not to have a happy Halloween in New Haven, a place that breezily subverts the motifs meant to menace us.
The city’s pretty and pleasant graveyards, like Grove Street and Beaverdale, aren’t grave at all. Its four bodies of water tell us fog is grand, not grim. The witty grotesques dotting Yale’s neo-Gothic architecture show us monsters have a playful side. The bones and skeletons of the Peabody Museum amaze and enlighten us, while the city’s escalating cocktail scene has made us perhaps dangerously unafraid of potions and elixirs.
Even the city’s one enduring ghost story, involving a sunken New Haven trading vessel-turned-“phantom ship,” which early settlers claimed to have seen sailing the horizon in 1647, is really about the haunting power of grief and dashed hopes. Meanwhile, today, the city’s most potent source of mythology, the Skull and Bones secret society, is also less ghastly than it appears, because however powerful it may be, the fact that it’s built on secrecy means it’s more afraid of us.
So it’s already assured, but I’ll say it anyway: Happy Halloween, New Haven.
Photo Key:
1. Beaverdale Memorial Park.
2. Big bad wolf/lawyer on Yale’s Sterling Law Building.
3. The Great Hall of Dinosaurs at the Peabody Museum.
4. A Mumbai Manhattan at Sherkaan.
5. Jesse Talbot’s The Embarkation of the Phantom Ship (c. 1850) at the New Haven Museum.
6. Fog along City Point.
7. A concoction at Hamilton Park.
8. Skull and Bones.
9. Grove Street Cemetery.
10. Fog from the bluffs at Fort Nathan Hale Park.
Written by Dan Mims. Images 1-5 and 7-10 photographed by Dan Mims. Image 6 photographed by Kathy Leonard Czepiel.
