r.e.m. time traveling: the hartford circus fire

i am occasionally haunted by ghostly victims of the 1944 hartford circus fire. sometimes they wander into my dreams at night. according to international circus code, when the band plays "stars & stripes forever" during a performace, it signals distress to the circus personnel.

"In 1950, a Circleville, Ohio man named Robert D. Segee claimed he was responsible for setting the Hartford Circus Fire. He said he had a nightmare in which an Indian riding on a "flaming horse" told him to set fires. He further claimed that after this nightmare his mind went blank, and that he did not come out of this state until the circus fire had already been set."

ghost bikes

"The practice of erecting ghost bikes to honor the cycling dead began in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003. Patrick Van Der Tuin, a local cyclist who runs a shop that caters to low-income riders, saw a bicyclist struck and killed. He painted a bike white and erected it on the spot with a sign reading "Cyclist Struck Here". When he saw how the bike caused drivers in the area to be more cautious he and a group of friends put up 15 more ghost bikes around the city. Since then ghost bikes have spread to 75 cities across four continents.

"There is something about it that resonates with people from so many different cultures," says Leah Todd, a volunteer at the Street Memorial Project, which builds and installs ghost bikes around New York. "Whether or not you knew the person there is an immediate resonance, a feeling among riders that it could have been you, a shared sense of helplessness on the streets."'

full story at obit-mag.com