Tag: Halloween

White Woman in Blackface as a Black Man in a White Coat? Scary.

Here’s a frank, perhaps surprising, and definitely disheartening admission: nothing you read here should be new to you. It’s been said a million times before. During Halloween weekend a white person at the University of Oregon appeared at an off-campus party in blackface. This distasteful and offensive act was distinctive only in its details —… Read more →

Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum

This past spring, the defunct Willard Psychiatric Center (previously known as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane) in Ovid, New York, opened its doors for tours — one day only, with no advance sale tickets. I immediately made plans to make the two-hour drive — after all, for the past few years, I’ve been working… Read more →

Feeling Lonesome This Halloween?: Nineteenth-Century Love Charms and Halloween Party Games

By Sean Cosgrove

Are you a single woman or man staring down the barrel of another Halloween spent curled up in bed with too much cheap candy corn you’ve bought in bulk from Walgreen’s under the auspices of being prepared for the hordes of trick-or-treaters that were never going to descend on your home?

Or, are you perhaps happily single or happily partnered and looking for the perfect Halloween party game? One you’ve probably never heard of before with a nice historical bent?

Even if the answer is no to both of those questions (and I would be very surprised), I still want you to grab a piece of paper and a pen, and get ready to embrace the Halloween spirit. Today, NursingClio is taking you back to the 1890s, my favourite historical decade, and bringing to you some of the ‘charms and spells’ guaranteed (if certain conditions are met) to be ‘cast with infallible certainty of result,’ bringing true love into your life.