As the wonderful Halloween month approaches, I'll be posting material at what's become lightning speed for me as of late: once a week, maybe even more. Because, let's face it, the problem with the site lately hasn't exactly been that it's too hard to keep up with. There's a new book listed among my literary sources called Ghosts of the Ohio River by Bruce Carlson.

Staying along the Ohio River, I have updates from the Eastern Ohio Valley region, beginning with a new haunting in flood-prone Shadyside, Belmont County: Coon Holler.

Since we're now hip-deep in October, the official month of Forgotten Ohio, I have some media appearances to announce. First of all, tomorrow morning (October 10) I'll be interviewed by the morning crew at Q92 WZKL FM in Canton to discuss Ohio's many haunted places and various other spooky stuff. It's part of their morning show and will air between 8AM and 8:30.

I've gotten a few e-mails about the models who appear in a handful of select spots on the website, and I thought I'd take a moment this time to explain. You see, I am no expert photographer. In fact, my knowledge of how to operate a real live top-quality Nikon camera with one of those fancy lenses that comes off and a shutter you can leave open for a second in low light, with an f-stop and all that jazz...well, I just don't know a damn thing about it. But I've been fortunate enough to have my photographs featured in newspapers, magazines, and other people's books, as well as on TV shows and official websites for things like NPR. Whether you've earned it or not, if you're having photographs appear in the Washington Post, I figured, you should have some ability as a photographer. So I read up on it and got some help from various friends who know their way around a camera, and I started taking photographs that aren't strictly for the website.

The thing is, my interest lies with the slightly dark and arcane, and I didn't want to go photographing sunsets in the mountains. A couple of my friends, acquaintances, and friends-of-friends model on occasion, so I decided to work on my ability to photograph people--specifically, good-looking girls in cemeteries and abandoned buildings. The results have been mixed only due to my own frequently-shaky camera work; the models have been nothing but wonderful. It's nothing that I think will offend anyone (no sexual content, naturally--that's what I'm saying) and the good photos out of each session really are quality stuff. I intend to create a little page for each model which lists the shoots we've done and where--that's something you'll see in a forthcoming update. For now, here are a couple of examples, first of my lovely girlfriend Mandi, posing at the Gates of Hell drainage system in Columbus, and second of the very gorgeous Jamie, posing among the headstones at Greenlawn Cemetery.

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