Well, October is here and for the first time in simply ages I'm not spending it as a Canadian. Which is too bad, because access to socialized healthcare would be great just at the moment, wouldn't it?
To explain:
A few years back an old friend of mine got in touch with me regarding a job. She was coordinating haunted bus tours in Saint Paul, MN, and needed tour guides. That is to say, it was a tour of sites that were haunted on a bus which - to the best of my knowledge - was not.
A few fun facts about Saint Paul, MN:
1: It's actually the State Capitol of Minnesota, although nine people out of ten think Minneapolis is. There's another interesting story nested inside that involving Pigs, the University of Minnesota, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, but we're already in a digression inside a digression inside a digression, so let's just leave that for now.*
2: There's a statistically significant number of sites in the City of Saint Paul that can make a reasonable claim to being haunted.
(A lot of this can be traced back to one small modernist hotel being built in the heart of the super rich area on Summit Avenue** back in the mid 1900s, which everyone got SUPER pissy about. This led to a whole series of by-laws regarding how no one was ever allowed to change anything about any of the buildings in that neighborhood ever again without a personal note from God, and even that was likely to be appealed by the HOA. The net result is that that stretch of Summit Avenue has the longest continuous run of unaltered Victorian mansions in the nation. And Victorian Mansions accumulate ghost stories like R. Kelly does urine-porn. Allegedly.)
So, at the risk of getting back to the point, I was invited to come and be one of those guides who stands at the front of a bus-full of people for two hours at a stride relating ghoulish tales of spectral phenomena that occurred right outside your drivers' side windows or your door side windows.
But there was a complication. The guides needed to be spooky costumed characters, because - you know - haunted bus tour. And while I, like all right minded people, recognize Halloween as the only good holiday, I only had one Halloween costume on hand.
A Canadian Mountie.
Not the most terrifying figure looming over our All Hallow's Eve iconography.
How, you might ask, did I end up with a Canadian Mountie costume. Years earlier, after years of making fuzzy animal costumes for Halloween and somehow not ending up as an object of sexualized desire, I decided that maybe cute fuzzy animals did not immediately lead to thoughts of sex***, and that I should, perhaps, try something with a little more intrinsic sex appeal.
The obvious answer was a uniform of some kind, but I wanted to also make sure to also be something a little more unique so that I would stand out. At this point I happened across an airing of the 1980s film 'Revenge of the Nerds' in which one of the mean frat guys is at a costume party dressed as a Mountie and I thought 'Yes. That is my answer.' And then I thought, 'WOW does this movie not hold up in any way. Yikes. Just yikes.'
But still, the frat guy looked pretty good in it, so I made myself a Mountie costume, took it on a trip to Halloween in Key West, and absolutely, comprehensively, proved that the fuzzy animal costumes had NOT been the problem.
But back to the story. So there I was with a tour guide job whose existence relied on my making a reasonable claim that the Canadian Mountie counted as 'spooky'.
Then, in the early waking moments one fine September morning, it came to me. It would work. And - more importantly - it was amusing to me. SO I went to the home base of the tours and presented their new guide -
Deadly Do-Right.
Spirit of Canadian Vengeance.
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| Pictured, hopefully with permission, in background - Nurse Hatchet. Who got me the gig. |
And so a legend was born. And for many years afterward my October nights were spent in an orgy of gratuitously drawn out long 'O's and attempts to work the words 'Zed' and 'Alluminium' into the stories as often as I possibly could. Eventually I became aware of Letterkenny, and the next couple of seasons became an extended game of forcing fans of the show to identify themselves through the simple expedient of beginning each ghost story with the words, 'How're ya now?'
Good times.
All done now, alas. Thanks to COVID, this season Deadly Do-Right rides no more, and the organization that does the tours is closing permanently in November. It was a good ride, and I'm proud to say that more than twenty years after I bought them, I could still fit into my jodhpurs. Although they were, admittedly, sometimes tighter than others...
And so, I give you all one last time my introductory spiel from the start of every single tour. Sing along if you know the correct pronunciation of 'house' and 'about'.
"Hello. How're ya now? My name is Deadly Do-Right, late of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I was betrayed by my partner for the cost of a Tim Horton's Doughnut****, and ever since am cursed to roam the world as the Canadian Spirit of Vengeance. Which is the politest form of vengeance currently available. And if you are not pure of heart, I will break into your house in the dead of night... znd leave a sternly worded note."
Good night, Deadly. It's been fun being you. Hopefully we'll meet again.
*In 1858, when Minnesota became a state, there were two big cities and so the compromise was that one of them would be the home of the State University, and the other would get to be the State Capitol. Minneapolis got the University. Unfortunately, the other City was named Pig's Eye, and had to go through some enthusiastic rebranding as 'Saint Paul' in order to make everyone not feel foolish. Pigs Eye gets mentioned a startling number of times in the Little House on the Prairie books, which might raise some eyebrows as its primary industries were meat packing and prostitution. Or, to put it another way, meat packing.
**When Tom Waits mentions in the song 'I Don't Want to Grow Up' that he doesn't want to live in a 'big old tomb on Grand Street', this is literally the neighborhood he's talking about. He lived here briefly in his teens.
*** One inadvertent outcome of all this was when, after a decade of wondering where I'd put it, my old Squirrel costume showed up as the official 'Rally Squirrel' of the Saint Paul Saints baseball team. I only have the vaguest of theories as to how it ended up there, but it's nice to see that it's aged well.
**** For a beautiful, short lived period Timmy's expanded internationally and we actually had them here, so people knew what I was talking about.
