Creative History

            Captain Henrick Van der Decken is in the grips of a drunken rage.  Again. It is the year 1641 and Van der Decken is at the helm of The Flying Dutchman, a ship in the employ of the Dutch East India Company.  He is desperate to get back home to Amsterdam as quickly as possible and to cash in his lucrative cargo of exotic spices from the far east. Some say he is driven by greed; some by his love for a woman back home and some say he is fueled solely by a combination of alcohol and madness.  Whether driven by his love for a woman, money or for the bottle, what Van der Decken doesn’t know at that moment is that because of his rash actions both he and the members of the crew of The Flying Dutchman are destined to never return home again.   The Flying Dutchman is about to spend all eternity as a ghost ship manned by a crew of spirits condemned to sail the high seas forever and ever. Disregarding all thoughts of...

            The night of January 3, 1804 is bitterly cold and moonless.  The residents of the borough of Hammersmith on the western outskirts of London are ill at ease and on edge as a still winter’s darkness descends over their neighborhood. Since early November of the previous year the people of this working class suburb have been reporting sightings of a white, sometimes formless almost translucent spectre floating through the air.  Some, especially those that have the misfortune of having to pass by the Hammersmith churchyard after nightfall on their way home from work, have even claimed to have been groped or attacked by the shrouded spirit. Speculation in the neighborhood has been running rampant.  Many believe that the so-called “Hammersmith Ghost” is the disembodied spirit of a man who hung himself the previous year and was buried in the consecrated ground of the churchyard.  According to English law, up until the year...