Goth Tourist in Glasgow

On my little holiday in Glasgow, I indulged myself by visiting various art museums. But, not all darkly inclined people are such art museum freaks as me, so I am going to feature just four sights that are rather gothy and are available all year around. All of these also happen to be free of charge.

The Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum

The Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum are an extensive collection of art, natural science, and history. The exhibit space is filled with paintings, statues, taxidermy animals, armors and what not.

My personal favourite of the artworks was this distressed Harpy by Mary Pownall (1902). The title of the work is The Harpy Celaeno. It was almost impossible to take a photo of the statue, for some reason my phone's camera refused to focus on it. Spooky.

The harpy is groping her chest, her claws bite into her own skin, and her face expression implicates sorrow and pain. Harpies are usually depicted without hands and often in groups, so this is an unusual sculpture. It is much more human than is customary.

From 1st of April till 1st of October 2017 they feature an exhibition of superheros and comics. It looks very interesting but unfortunately I did not get to see it.

Glasgow University & the Hunterian Museum

Magnificent Gothic architecture of the University is worth checking out, and so is the Hunterian Museum inside it. The museum is named after William Hunter (1718–1783), who was a former student of the University and a keen collector of all things marvelous. His collection was the base for the museum. Collection ranges from the artifacts of Ancient Rome to Physics inventions.

The most macabre part of the collection is the Anatomical and Pathological Collection. Many of the samples are human but some are disfigured animals with more heads and feet than is usual.

The Glasgow Botanical Gardens

Glasgow Botanic Gardens are a marvelous place but for goths and other macabre folk the Botanic Gardens offer a whole room dedicated to killer plants. These plants are carnivores and on my visit I learned that there are 5 different method categories for the plants to trap their pray. One of them being 'lobster pot traps which use inward and downward pointing hairs to force pray to move towards a digestive organ'.

I doubt these particular carnivorous plants in the photo use that method of 'lobster pot traps' but they sure are beautiful. The other rooms of the hothouses were very nice too.

Glasgow Necropolis

Last but not least, the Glasgow Necropolis. It is a Victorian garden cemetery and there are many beautiful and ornamental gravestones and memorials. The Friends of Glasgow Necropolis organize guided tours and it is a good idea to participate one if possible. The Friends of Glasgow guides give depth to your visit, because they can tell about the history of the graves and the cemetery.

If your visit doesn't match with the tour program, another thing I can recommend is to buy a book they've published: The Glasgow Necropolis After lives – Tales of Interments by Ruth Johnston. It costs £ 8 plus delivery but it does make your visit way better. Me and my friend had that book with us when we went on our visit and it was marvelous.

We started on the recommended route up the hill and every time we saw an interesting gravestone, we searched its photo from Johnston's book. The book includes 150 most interesting graves and Johnston has collected all sorts of facts about the artwork, the lives of the people who are buried there, and so forth.

I hope these tips will be helpful for another goth tourist in Glasgow!

Goth Tourist in Glasgow and Edinburgh

Soon, I will hop on a plane and fly to Glasgow. A dear friend of mine lives there and I am going to visit her on my holiday. We plan to visit Edinburgh together and go see something goths will find interesting: Surgeons' Hall Museums.

There are two museums and one collection:

• the History of Surgery Museum
• the Dental Collection
• the Wohl Pathology Museum

I am just dying to see them all. Lame pun intended.

Me and my friend are also planning to visit the Necropolis in Glasgow. Sarah from Tales From A Geordie Goth visited it quite recently. Sarah was super nice and gave me some more tips on her post about places to see!

Stay tuned for my travel posts!

Goth bloggers visiting the grave of Fred Gwynne aka Herman Munster

On Thursday I and Goth Gardener visited Carroll County, Maryland. She had spring break and I had a day off, so we decided to make a goth pilgrimage to a nearby cemetery and the grave of Fred Gwynne, who is well known for his role as Herman Munster in The Munsters TV show from the sixties. It was a heartwarming satire of both the old monster movies and the everyday American family. The Family of Munsters was rather dysfunctional sometimes and Herman and Lily Munster were the first ever fictive married couple in American television to be shown in bed together. Of course they were not doing anything more upsetting than talking.

Goth Gardener drove to DC and we met at the campus of the university she teaches at. We took off and drove about an hour to reach the cemetery in Maryland. We had bought flowers in order to pay our respect for an astonishing actor (he was also in the film version of Stephen King’s Pet Cemetary!) who for some reason is buried in an unmarked grave. The Goth Gardener said she is going to try to find out why it is so, so I am not going to do any research on that. So go check her post!

It was a pleasant drive and we chatted away the whole time. My partner in crime had searched out the place of the grave and I had searched other activities for us for the afternoon. The place Mr. Gwynne is buried is a small and silent graveyard. When we got there, a murder of crows flew past, it was beautiful but it passed so quickly one could not even try to reach a camera. We just stood and watched.

The Place was surrounded by fields. And there were suspiciously many graves of people called Caple. SOme of the stones were beautifully worn, like this one.

It was lovely and sunny, so bright we could not manage without sunglasses. So we looked even more suspicious and unsettling, laying flowers to an unmarked grave.

I did not know before this trip that Fred Gwynne also wrote children’s books. I am determined to read some of them, or as many as I can get my hands on.

After the visit of Fred Gwynne we got into the car and drove to a shop that sold antiques and other oddities. Some vintage jewelry was beautiful but nothing on the selves screamed at me take me, take me! Though there were many a peculiar objects.

There were a surprising amount of things related to the Wizard of Oz, the books and the movie. There were a lot of collectibles of all kinds, from Betty Boops to Barbie dolls and traffic signs. Here I am pointing at the OZ poster with a quote "Now, you don't have to be a genius to look brilliant."

I guess we spent nearly an hour ogling all curiosities and finally decided it was time to eat. We drove to the center of the nearby town and found this lovely place called CUP Tea Bar & Cafe. The atmosphere was tranquil, the waiters were super nice, their iced tea was delicious and food was excellent. If you ever find yourselves in Carroll County, Maryland, do visit this place!

I do not normally take pictures of things I am about to eat but here is the delicious salad I had. Goth Gardener made me take a photo! And I really like to show how delicious it looks like and thus emphasize my review of CUP.

I do not know if you are familiar with the concept Women laughing alone with salad but what I am doing in the next photo is pretty borderline.

The gravy is not well seen but it is blood red raspberry sauce. Since I am a bit dorky with macabre sense of humor, I joked that if I smear the sauce on my lips, I am a vampire, if on the nostril I look like I have a cocaine addiction and if I smudge it by my ear I might have a brain tumor. Did not try it though, it was too delicious! Goth Gardener bravely laughed at me (or with me). ;)

After our late lunch we strolled to the local museum but their shop was closed. Too bad since in their internet page they mention they sell books about haunted houses in Maryland! Next door was the tourist information and boldly we entered. We found a leaflet of a Haunted House tour in the town! So, off we went and naturally we would snicker and giggle and read out loud the texts from the brochure with ominous voices.

As you can see from the photos, we are really mature individuals.  In the photos we are in front of The Acension Church, where an evil Legh Master is buried. According to the brochure Legh was a cruel and awful individual and is said to be haunting the area as an evil spirit. Some of the sights had tabloid journalism kind of headlines, like Headless Jailbird. In 1844 Christmas Eve a horrid criminal Big Tom slit his throat in jail. The staff summoned a doctor Zollickhoffer, who was very into Phrenology. That is the study of bumps on the head in comparison to character and mental disorders. He got very excited of Big Tom's head and asked if he could take it with him, without the rest of the body, which at its decomposing state was of no use to Dr. Zollickhoffer. The staff of the jail agreed and today people claim to have seen a headless figure roaming around in the vicinity of the old jail. Could that be Big Tom they've seen?? as they asked in the leaflet.

On our escapade in Carroll County we saw an advertisement of “Peep Show”in the local Art Center. Now, I did not know Americans call these little marzipan Easter candy as Peeps so I assumed it was some sort of an Easter striptease show and I was amused, until Goth Gardener revealed the true meaning. Here is her post straightening it all! ;)  After that we both laughed at my misapprehension! It was not even on the day we were there and according to a brochure there were Disney character statues made out of Peeps. I guess I was a little disappointed. :D

We spend another day together on this week too, so next week I'll be posting about the things we did in DC on the Spring Equinox!