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Cobwebs and witches are for children and morons. If you're looking for the most hair-raising Halloween horrors, try scouring the streets of the Eastside. That's where we found the most pants-wettingly scary houses, sure to give you night terrors well past Halloween and all the way until November 4. Because in an election year, nothing's more terrifying than the future.
"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear," wrote British philosopher Edmund Burke in 1756. It's as true today as ever. Case in point: this bloodcurdling Mercer Island lawn display, a quadruple whammy of Republican propaganda capable of driving the most reasonable citizen to insanity. By day, it's a standard collection of yard signs on a well-manicured lawn. But at night, it's a GOP graveyard, where the yard-sign tombstones are unearthed by zombie candidates hungry for brains. Do you have what it takes to drive a stake through the heart of zombie Dino Rossi or blast a shotgun into the chest of zombie Dave Reichert or fight off the reanimated ashes of Steve Litzow, swirling out of that terrifying urn? Run.
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Hungarian peasants have an old and terrible story about "the tree of death," which by some trick of evil had lurking in its twisted branches the "dark lord," the master of the underworld, the evil that brings all things to their end. It was there in the tree, waiting, watching, and preying on the living. Passing this dead—nay, murdered—tree on Mercer Island takes us back to the scariest bowels of Hungary, only instead of one dark lord, this tree is possessed by a trinity of evil, represented quite fittingly by cheap glossy crassness tacked over mercilessly hacked nature.
What is more terrifying than this edifice, in which there is no door, few windows, and no handholds by which one might scale its faceless heights to register complaint? One half-expects loudspeakers on the roof to be blaring Orson Welles voice, from his movie version of Franz Kafka's The Trial: A man comes from the country, begging admittance to the law. But the guard cannot admit him. Can he hope to enter at a later time? "That is possible," says the guard. The man tries to peer through the entrance. He had been taught that the law should be accessible to every man. "Do not attempt to enter without my permission," says the guard. "I am very powerful, but I am the least of all the guards." Without a doubt, this is no home to man, but a monolithic holding cell packed floor-to-ceiling with bubbling black goo.
That John McCain sign is screamingly scary enough in the early-evening light, like a little flag for an evil army of pint-sized ghouls marching through the leafy streets of Mercer Island. And that zigzagging, funereal fence behind it? That is the sign of an isolated home, sheltering isolated minds—bristling, cold and black, a thousand points of death—and the kind of house that gives trick-or-treaters miniboxes of raisins. Beware.
This most terrifying tableau gains its power from what's not shown but easily imagined: the presence of John McCain and Sarah Palin not in name but bodily form, striding triumphantly onto this balcony like a trailer-park Eva Perón and her cryogenically defrosting old-man running mate. Down below, the desperate, unemployed masses huddle in the shrubs, their bellies roiled by hunger and heartbreak, their cold bare ankles stung by the blades of wet grass. Or... could those be tiny tentacles or the haunted bubbling of mass graves or the desperate clutching fingers of a special-needs child? Flee, and don't look back.
Like an oversized cousin of John McCain's aged, brown iguana teeth, this
foreboding fence is busy keeping immigrants out and Jesus's love within. How
like the wily immigrant is the frightening foliage, as it insidiously creeps and
scratches at Real America's doorstep! How mighty the speculum of Dino Rossi—an
army of dead-baby ghosts at his back—aborting civil rights before civil rights
can abort him first! Who knows what liberal bogeymen lurk outside this fence's
cherished sanctum? The nightmare has just begun for you, Republican fence.
Comments (1402)Showing 10 of 1402 comments. Read all comments.
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don't hate.- Report as off-topic, spam, false, or abusive.
The answer is easy. Obama is Obama and Democrats are Democracts. Hope that helps.- Report as off-topic, spam, false, or abusive.
"Don't hate"? That's your comment? What a lame fucking thing to say! Oh, you're probably a Seattle hippie. God, I really, really, really don't miss certain things about the West Coast and hippie-dippies are probably the ones I don't miss the most!- Report as off-topic, spam, false, or abusive.
This article is clearly meant to incite and provoke. Hate is hate. The owners, staff and advertisers of The Stranger better pray for the safety of the residents of these properties.- Report as off-topic, spam, false, or abusive.
I'm all for having a few laughs about the election, but publishing home addresses could be perceived by some as intimidation...- Report as off-topic, spam, false, or abusive.
Spike, that 'hippie-dippie' just might be voting for your candidate. Just thought I'd put things in perspective.- Report as off-topic, spam, false, or abusive.
What's really scary is this article.Underlying the humor is intolerance both for free speech and an open political system. Perhaps you'll never have to fear lawn signs again after this election. If Acorn is allowed to continue their fraudulent registration frenzy and farcical quality control, voting won't mean much. Liberals can then relax, and fear democracy no more.
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Frankinfreedom, a little reading of history can go a looong way. Lets put things in perspective here. Acorn admits to falsely registering voters in King County, and they turned in, to the election authorities, registration forms that were falsely filled out by members of the public. Registering voters is not the same as those voters actually voting! Now, in Duvall County, Florida, over 26,000 voters were wrongly, and falsely denied of their votes, in 2000. That's one county!Acorn is not a danger to democracy. Diebold, owned by Republicans, is much more of a threat, as in the machinations of Secretaries of State Kathryn Harris, of Florida, and Kenneth Blackwell, of Ohio, both Republicans by the way. Obviously Frankinfreedom you have no idea as to what you are talking about.
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'The answer is easy. Obama is Obama and Democrats are Democracts. Hope that helps. 'Hey 'Independent', if you hate Democrats, you are a Reactionary, and far worse than any Democrat or Republican, because you can only react to what others have proposed. Please find a working political philosophy, and a clue. You stupid or what?
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Publishing addresses crosses the line, for all your talk of open ideas, you are clearly against free speech. Let people have their lawn signs, it's their right as Americans - morons.Showing 10 of 1402 comments. Read all comments.