With Halloween weekend creeping up, Duke will open to the public some of the library's eeriest archival holdings while faculty members ponder the strangeness of human behavior and our attraction to things that go bump in the night.
Tricks are optional, but treats are mandatory during the library's open house from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 31. The event will be held in the Rare Book Room in Perkins Library and will feature some of the "most macabre items from the shadowy depths of the library's vaults," compiled by assistant librarian Rachel Ingold. The items on view will include:
Read More-- a box of glass eyeballs;
-- letters to Duke University's now defunct Parapsychology Laboratory describing the 1949 poltergeist case that became the basis for "The Exorcist";
-- brochures and advertisements for coffins and other funeral-related paraphernalia from the Advertising Ephemera Collection;
-- maps and photographs of the Rigsbee Graveyard, located among the parking lots east of Wallace Wade Stadium;
-- and a role-playing board game featuring "Jack the Ripper."
Human fascination with the macabre and supernatural may be part of the human condition and helps us to make sense of the unknown, said Thomas Robisheaux, a Duke history professor who studies witchcraft. "We are always looking to make sense out of events that present themselves as chaos and confusion, especially if those events impinge on our lives in a very direct way," Robisheaux said.
Witches, goblins and other evil doers with ties to the underworld have historically served as scapegoats for all that we don't understand. Robisheaux, who is the author of "The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Villages," says "the witch is just a variation on the bigger term of 'the other.' "
It poses an interesting paradox in our modern times when people actively seek out "the other" for thrills and fun.
Scott Huettel, an associate professor in Duke's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, said the brain can mitigate the true shock value of fear by anticipating the future beyond the fear. So, he said, we can experience real fear in a haunted house and still relate the experience to friends with laughter.
"We feel physiological stress when watching a scary movie, to be sure, but we know in advance that the stress is artificial and temporary -- and thereafter we will have the happy experience of discussing our shared fear with our friends," Huettel said.
Many of us will mark the weekend by subjecting ourselves to the physiological stress of horror movies. Neal Bell, a professor of the practice in Duke's Theater Studies department and a horror movie aficionado, agrees with Huettel -- gory movies provide a momentary break from reality by offering "safe fear."
"Though some horror films can be a vacation for the brain, the great ones are truly disturbing and thought-provoking. ... You can let yourself get scared and know at the end of it you can escape back into the more familiar horrors of 'real' life," Bell said.