Today I took my brother, Emily and Jonathan to Draugasetrið – The Ghost Centre. This is the Rock City version of ghosts. It’s in a tiny, tiny town right by the ocean. The museum itself is housed in this old fish cannery, which still retains ghost odors of fish. In the waiting area, we had a beer and watched people emerge, shrieking from the tour.
I mean, full-fledged screams. From grownups.
I’d been there once before, but hadn’t sat in the waiting area watching the emergence. It was pretty impressive to watch people run out. I had told them what to expect before we went in. The exhibits look like the sort of things an artistically inclined community would put together for the Halloween haunted house. Lots of black plastic and burlap seperating the exhibits. Which are really nothing more than static dioramas of events from the stories. Sometimes, they don’t consist of anything more than a picture.
The cd has an icelandic narrator, speaking in english, who speaks slower than a snail on ice. He has this deep, mournful voice and no awareness of when the narrative is funny. “After sailors die at sea, they return. Sometimes angry, sometimes sad, but always wet.”
So why the screaming?
One of the ghost stories is about Rusty, a ghost of a young boy who haunts travellers. He is called this because of the color of his ragged clothes. They have hired a couple of teenage boys to jump out at the people going through the museum, and they are really good at it.
We screamed. And then we laughed. A lot. It was fun, although by the end I was starting to cut loose some of my stage screams. Which is fun in a different way.
That sounds interesting. I’ve never been to a haunted house, because I’m afraid I’ll wet myself or something. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a firm believer in ghosts, which is why this entry caught my eye right away.