Spooky London

Damn, can you believe it's November? I can't. It's starting to get cold -- almost feels like fall in Calgary. (Ha ha ha. Suckers! Enjoying the snow?!)

Anyway, to celebrate Halloween -- the best holiday ever -- went on another guided walking tour. I've already done the Jack the Ripper one a few October 31sts back, so we did a more general one this time. (My god, I've been out here a while; this is my third London Halloween!)

The meeting point was Monument tube station; I've never really been around the Monument and have only seen it from a distance. It memorializes the Great Fire of 1666 -- which doesn't need much help, as it was mentioned over and over again on this tour -- and is a big tower with a shiny flame on top. According to our caped, pale tour guide -- ah, I miss dressing up -- only five people (which I scoffed at) died in the fire (despite it wiping out 4/5 of the city?) but 17 have thrown themselves off the Monument. Mmm, spooky irony.

We then walked around to various sites in the City, most of which I could never find again and can't remember the stories to anyway. Gotta say, not the spookiest ghost stories I've heard -- the Ghouls, Gaslight and Guinness tour I did with my parents was better, but then again, there wasn't 150 people attending then, either.

The two highlights were definitely easy to pick. We were standing behind a church -- which is along the alley where Scrooge's offices are set in A Christmas Carol -- and the guide dude was telling us a very-not-scary experience another tour guide had, involving hearing mysterious organ music. Right as we all turn away to see waddle to the next site, organ music blares, and a dude dressed like a ghoul starts running about, cackling at teenagers... before he suddenly starts breakdancing. So awesome.

The other highlight also involves an out-of-work actor. The last stop was in Charterhouse Square, which is where thousands of plague victims were buried. Guide-dude was storyficating about a young orphaned boy who worked for his uncle, who ran a company of dead-collecters; the guide actually said, "Bring out your dead," which resulted in me giggling and doing Monty Python imitations. Anyway, the uncle killed the little boy by throwing him in the pit of plague victims -- yucky stuff. At this point, a guy covered in fake blood with a fake hand in his mouth starts screaming and running into our group. Managed to get a few good screams from this one group of teens, but then he kept doing it -- laps back and forth, with this hand in his mouth, making gutteral screamy noises, before dropping the hand and oddly yelling: "Do you want it?!!?!"

Ahh, good times. But not very scary.