Gallery: Ferndale goes mad for Halloween

All houses wherein men have lived and died

Are haunted houses. Through the open doors

The harmless phantoms on their errands glide

With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Haunted Houses

I rather like Longfellow’s idea that all our houses are haunted by the harmless phantoms of their previous inhabitants. It makes ghosts seem not scary but rather people like ourselves, long gone but having left their mark upon our homes.

When we stayed in Ferndale in northern California in late September the town was already going mad for Halloween. As we walked along the one main street decorators were out adorning shop fronts with orange bunting, placing numerous skeletons on all the buildings, and chatting to business owners about their own additions to the town’s displays. Of course it was all in fun, not to scare!

It’s as much fun to scare as to be scared

Vincent Price

It certainly added to our enjoyment of our brief stay in the town. I’ve already shared a couple of black and white edits of photos taken there in my black and white Halloween gallery. And now here, for Natalie’s Photographing Public Art challenge, are more of my favourites, this time in their full colours.

The Victorian Village

And for Jo’s Monday Walk, I’ll add some more images from our walk around the town. Ferndale promotes itself as the ‘Victorian Village’, and certainly buildings from that era dominate the main street. The town was founded in the mid nineteenth century and grew thanks to dairy farming in the surrounding area, which still dominates the landscape around the town. There is a strong sense of small-town Americana here, where everyone knows everyone else, and the pace of life is slow.

The architectural styles are a mishmash of Victoriana, from the humble to the ornate, including Gothic Revival, Italianate, Eastlake and Queen Anne styles. I noted quite a few false fronts to the buildings, so it seems those early inhabitants were keen to impress! Some of the most elaborate homes have been dubbed ‘Butterfat Palaces’ because they were built on the wealth of that dairy industry.

I visited Ferndale in September 2024