Every maze, haunted house and the hayride were scary and entertaining. It was a really fun night and well put together, we were especially impressed with the animatronics and organization of the event. Will definitely return in the future.
If you are ever in Steubenville, Ohio, that plucky burg of seedy steel mills and fresh-faced Catholic youth, it is to be hoped that you may chance upon the old main street, where there is a very remarkable bookshop. It is the only bookshop in town, and you can tell it is a real bookshop because a cat lives there, classical music plays on the radio, and it is haunted.
It won at its haunted house of Utah in the wee Eastern hours, forcing five turnovers so that a person in the East might have kept waking and wondering whether a fumble was a new fumble or a replay of a previous fumble.
Disney is creepy when it is empty so I can see why people would have stories of being watched or have strange feelings. I remember sweeping the line for Roger Rabbit one night and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man standing near me in a navy blue t shirt and black Dickies style shorts. I asked if he needed anything and when I looked up he was gone. I walked pretty fast all the way through the line looking for him and nobody was in there. Nobody was in there because Toontown was closed. It seemed like everyone had a Haunted Mansion, haunted bathroom, Tom Sawyer or Toontown story so I kept the strange things that happened to me to myself. I felt like nobody would believe me anyway.
I have a gift and on occasion whenever I enter the park and I am not caught up in the thrill of just being in Disneyland I can sense the presence of unseen beings in various sections of the park, like for instance the Haunted Mansion every now and then I get the feeling of a being observing me it is an intent feeling, as well as the strong sense along main street that all is not as it seems in this happy place an underlying sense of foreboding and distress.
Dawn B.
The stock room of the Star Trader that shares a wall with a section of track is also haunted. Cast Members avoid going there alone and feel like they are being pushed down the stairs leading up to it. There is also a spirit of a child that haunts the area around the Splash Mountain drop. He likes to peak over the counter at the Cast Member who closes the Briar Patch merchandise location there.
Susanne S.
I had two friends that worked the canoe ride and they both said they had ghostly experiences of someone touching them or seeing something out in the water but there was nothing there.
Laurie W.
Star Traders Stockrooms are also haunted. I always felt being watched and hearing kids voices laughing. I remember going up to the 4th level stockroom getting plush and hearing children voices.
Sara W.
OMG. My locker was in Space Mountain, too. And yes, it was not uncommon to hear voices and doors opening/shutting. You would look to see if another cast member was around, but the place would be empty.
DeeAynn D.
I worked on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. I was walking the track after closing and just around the bend from the first lift, I saw a shadow on the mountain wall walking along with me. It was not my shadow. This shadow figure had on a baseball cap; I did not wear my costume hat when doing a track walk. I saw this figure on several occasions when I closed. Yes, I talked to him every time.
Sherilyn B.
I was working alone to restock Five and Dime. (The merchandise store in Toontown.) Toontown had closed for the night and all the other Cast Members had left. While re-stocking shirts a mug fell off the shelf on the other side of the store. Again no one else in the store but me and I was a good 20 feet away. The shelf is super sturdy and heavy wood attached to the wall.
Not all intimidating or unmaintained systems are haunted. Newcomers may find it difficult to navigate a codebase full of subtle intended behaviors; a stable implementation of some RFC might remain unchanged through a decade of shifting fashion. When deciding whether a codebase is unsalvageable, look at the relationship between the code and the engineers who work with it.
Nobody understands how the system should behave. Not knowing what it currently does is materially different from not knowing what it should do. The former is amenable to standard testing and refactoring processes; the latter can only be solved by redesigning from core principles. After a new design has been completed, it may turn out that some parts of the old code (e.g., test cases or UI components) are still useful and can be salvaged.
The codebase is resistant to automated tooling. Static analysis, unit testing, and interactive debuggers are high-leverage tools for working within a healthy codebase. If the structure of the project prevents their use, it can be difficult to land meaningful improvements even in the absence of other problems. Large codebases written in dynamically typed languages are especially prone to this issue, with metaprogramming like __getattr__ or method_missing being substitutes for and inhibitors of sustainable development practices.
User interaction will make or break your rewrite. You must understand what the touchpoints are for users of the existing system so that you can maintain UI compatibility throughout the migration. These might be minor (wrappers around an existing CLI) or major (direct access to the backend datastore). Try to batch up user-facing changes: A single clear cutover, with users in control of the timing, will go over better than drip-feeding workflow disruptions over weeks or months. If the user-facing changes are significant, see if you can arrange for separate opt-in and opt-out periods during which both interaction modes coexist.
Subsystem API boundaries ensure that there are no unexpected communication channels between the newly independent subsystems as you carve the old system into chunks. Be fairly strict about this: Run them in separate processes, separate machines, or whatever is needed to guarantee complete visibility and control over how data moves. Do this recursively until the components are small enough that rewriting each one from scratch is tedious instead of frightening.
The first system was a data center capacity management tool which tracked allocation of compute resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) among product areas. One of the earliest design decisions was to distribute the core logic as a C++ library linked into every client, which made API changes impractically difficult. By the time I joined the original project it had been around for several years and had survived significant tidal shifts in scope and purpose, such that every user-facing operation had to filter through sedimentary layers of complex business logic.
Woody Allen once said that tragedy plus time equals comedy. But tragedy plus time also equals ghost stories, at least at Kenyon, where tales of haunted hallways pass from generation to generation, a richly embroidered folklore on a campus that can sometimes feel, well, eerie.
Some Kenyon ghost stories grew out of actual events, like the Old Kenyon Fire, while others have shakier credentials. Reading through the "ghosts folder" in the College archives, I found the phrase "it is said" used a good deal. That can be a stand-in for "as if." It is said brokers a deal between the teller and the listener: It's probably nonsense, but let's tell the story anyway. After all, dinner's over and who wants to go study?
If you're hunting for Kenyon ghost stories, the first thing you discover is that the mother lode of paranormality can be found in the campus safety office, aka security. Safety officers are in creepy old buildings late at night, and they patrol a ghost town in the summer, at least in between visits from barbershoppers, cheerleaders, and other summer groups. The officers will tell you everything as long as you ply them with margaritas. And they keep incident reports, which is kind of like Deep Throat providing receipts.
Theater people are also good sources, because they're practiced in "suspending their disbelief" and they're always building or rehearsing something in the wee hours of the morning. They subscribe to archaic superstitions, urge each other to break their legs, and never utter the name of the Scottish play (I can't even type it). They leave a light burning on-stage, which is either for the ghosts or to keep away the ghosts, nobody's entirely clear on that; and they do famous plays which are predicated upon somebody seeing a ghost that tells them to do stuff.
The DKE's consider Stuart Pierson, the notorious turn-of-the-century train fatality, a fraternity brother. On the anniversary of "Stewie's" death, they carry a coffin filled with stones down Middle Path and gather at the fateful trestle bridge, where fraternity officers wearing hooded cloaks read the coroner's report by torchlight. (In recent years, they've also read aloud passages from Fred Kluge's Alma Mater.)
Where, you ask, do they get the hooded cloaks? I forgot to ask. But I know the ceremony ends with the burning of a wooden DKE sign, which they extinguish in the river, leaving its ashes behind on the train tracks. (After that, I'm pretty sure they go party.)
And then there's the swimming team. Although they now compete in the airy, ultra-modern Kenyon Athletic Center, the swimmers still venture down the spiral stairs into the Shaffer boiler-room the night before they leave for nationals. By candlelight, one of the seniors tells the story of "The Greenhouse Ghost," the diver who broke his neck on the glass roof and drowned in Shaffer Pool.
The team members crouch to walk the perimeter of the old pool and end by counting off the number of their national titles, adding one, like a birthday-cake candle to grow on. Swimmer Michael Northcutt '08 says the ritual "is an awesome reminder of those that swam before us." Or perhaps, as former Dean Tom Edwards puts it, "That boiler-room would scare anybody" into team solidarity.
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