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Chapter 1: What spooky stories are featured in this Halloween episode?
Welcome to The Moth. I'm Sarah Austin Janess. I've always believed in ghosts. Believed in is such a funny phrase because spirits to me are, of course, around us at all times. I don't find this scary. In fact, I find it comforting. I and the other Moth directors travel the country helping people tell their stories. And we've stayed in a lot of hotels, a number of which are haunted.
In fact, once in New Orleans with our pop-up porch, I was at a restaurant on Frenchman Street and I was tapped on the shoulder. Double tapped, actually. I turned around and no one was there. Not only was no one there, but there was no door behind me, no entrance or way to exit. And I told my friend next to me, and she nodded with a smile. Spirits are everywhere, and I'm into it.
On this episode, in celebration of the spookiest of holidays, Halloween, we've got three stories all about the larger forces at play in the universe. Plus, I'll talk with another Moth director about some of the supposedly haunted hotels we've stayed at over the years. First up, a story about Halloween itself.
Ophira Eisenberg told this when she was hosting our main stage in East Hampton, New York. Here's Ophira live at the Moth.
I'm just going to share just a couple minutes on a big night story of mine. I was remembering seventh grade. Seventh grade. That was the first year for my life that there was a dance that was co-ed. That was a really big deal. And I will admit to you that I was a girl that just always wanted a boyfriend. I always wanted a boyfriend. Never a pony. Always a boyfriend.
And so it was the first school dance and I had a crush on this guy, Brad Moore, did not change his name, Brad Moore. And he was kind of goofy and he had brown floppy hair and he played saxophone. But I just thought he was, I thought he was incredible. I had a huge crush on him. And so I went to get a Halloween costume. We were thrifting at the time, even then.
and I found this purple and gold jumpsuit that was all sparkly, like some Ziggy Stardust cover band fell apart, and they donated all their clothing. And so I bought it, and I was gonna be a space alien. Very seventh grade mentality. And I was getting ready for the evening and I was pretty excited about the dance. And my sister, my older sister, was an aspiring special effects makeup artist.
So she was like, I want to do your makeup. Makeup has come such a long way, my friends. because she decided she was gonna put glitter all over my face. But the way there wasn't glitter makeup like there is now, she put sections of white school glue on my face and she would tap the glitter out of the little vial. and we'd wait for it to dry and then she would do more glue here and tap it.
Yeah, and so she did these bands of glitter that were like blue, purple, gold, silver, all with school glue. We had a friend, I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, who had given us some pheasants that he shot to eat and my mother had plucked them and kept all the feathers because they were beautiful. So my sister was like, let's glue the feathers all through your hair.
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Chapter 2: How did Ophira Eisenberg's Halloween experience shape her view on ghosts?
And he had spiked his hair and it was sprayed green with that like classic spirit of Halloween hairspray that you would only be available at the Kmart right in October. And I just marched over to him and I said, I think we should dance. And he said, I didn't know you wanted to dance with me. I know, it was the, a man, I'm 50 years old, a man has not been that vulnerable to me since that day.
And I was like, yeah, I want to dance with you. So we dance and we dance like this. Arms on shoulders, hands on hips. That's what we're supposed to do. But we did creep closer and closer. And at one point my head was right beside his head and I was deeply inhaling that sweet toxicity of the Halloween hairspray. It's such a specific smell. It's like turpentine and Febreze.
And my entire body was just on fire, electricity, or maybe I was high off the fumes, I don't know. But it was exhilarating. And then after that, we went around for two months. That's what we said back in seventh grade. We went around. And I will just tell you that sense memory, when it comes to smell, is one of the strongest.
And I will go into stores right around Halloween and find, you can still find it, Spirit of Halloween, that particular hairspray. And I'll just be like, I'm just trying it. And I'll spray it on like a little card and inhale it. And I'm just reminded of being exhilarated and empowered.
That was Ophira Eisenberg. Ophira is a stand-up comedian, writer, and the host of the podcast Parenting is a Joke. She'll be recording her new comedy special, I Used to Be Nicer, at the Comedy Cellar in New York City on November 9th, produced by Lewis Black's production company. So I mentioned earlier that while crisscrossing the country as a moth director, I've stayed in some haunted hotels.
I invited fellow director Jodi Powell to talk about some of our shared experiences.
Sarah, I'm so excited to be here. This is right on my alley. I love this topic. So yes, I have one moment in particular. And I remember we had a show coming up in West Virginia. And when I looked around the area of the venue, there wasn't any place for us to stay. So we had to stay a little bit out of bounds, let's call it.
And when I looked up the hotel that was available to us, it proudly mentioned that it was haunted. I didn't have to search for it. It was right there. And I thought to myself, well, we could stay here or nowhere. There was nowhere else. Right. So I put my producer hat on and I showed a voice off in my head. And let's be clear. Let's be clear. I'm from Jamaica.
And in Jamaica, the concept of ghosts and the third wherever realm you want to imagine is 100 percent there. In Jamaica, we call them duppies. But I had to kind of quiet that down a little bit and I had to put on my producer hat and I said, I'm going to book it. Nobody will know. And we're just there for two nights and we're going to be in and out. And, you know, we'll get over it.
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