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NEW YORK - THANKS A LOT, THE NEW YORK POST

During a search for a job she could get while still maintaining status as a total fuck-up, my friend found some creepy dude online who was hosting a haunted house for one weekend only. He was recruiting women to go to the corner of Avenue U and some other street in the hinterlands of Brooklyn and wait for an SUV to pick them up and take them to the haunted house. "I just need some girls to scream for the kids," he told her, and offered $9 an hour for an unspecified position. When she realized she’d have to work about three hours just to make up for the cost of the can of pepper spray she’d have to buy to take on her interview, she decided it wasn’t worth it.

So I take a quick look at this headline in the Post today and I think I’m going to have a rip-roaring time with the rest of the story. Like, ha ha, some crazy fucker really did have a haunted house and actually killed people in it, and just in time for Halloween. How very Ray Bradbury. Then I read the story and almost puked up my macaroni and cheese.

Some mobsters allegedly lured a caretaker into the very haunted mansion he caretakes, where he was stabbed, drowned, chopped up, and burned. The only way it could get any worse for this guy is if a terrible/amazing newspaper took his decapitated head and transposed it onto the body of Casper the friendly ghost wafting out of the house in which he was murdered. Annnnnnnd, that's exactly what happened.

I'm sure this image is as hilarious to you as it was to me before I read the graphic account of his ghostification, but I have an irrational fear of amputation and decapitation. Most people would say no, that’s a rational fear, but it’s like how most people who are afraid of heights are actually afraid that they’ll jump from heights. Sometimes the fear of losing a limb gets so intense I almost want my arm chopped off just to get it over with. So please, newspapers of the world, a little restraint for fuck’s sake. You can photoshop the head of Jonbenet onto a boogie boarding squirrel for all I care, just don’t go into minute detail about how some poor dude was butchered. I’m still not over that freaky consensual German cannibalism murder from 2001, and it’s not even the cannibalism that bothers me.

LIZ ARMSTRONG