TEXARKANA - This weekend the Texarkana Museums System takes folks on a cemetery tour, but the following weekend on tap is a downtown tour with macabre topics for the theme.
Death and Dying: Customs and Curiosities on Halloween night, Oct. 31, with a 6:30 p.m. start will take attendees to downtown locations for discussion about the strange and eerie traditions of the past. It's part of the TMS Texarkana Twilight Tours series and includes a living history performance.
TMS Curator Jamie Simmons said they will take a Halloween-ish approach, but it is essentially a historically-themed walk through downtown.
"What we're going to be doing is we're going to be walking through the downtown area, talking about the general history of Texarkana but also specific spots where we can tell a story about how the Victorians and Edwardians and people in the early 20th Century viewed death and how they handled it," Simmons said.
They'll stop at funeral homes, for example, where there's a prime opportunity to discuss burials and the connection to hospitals.
Simmons describes it as a combination of a history tour focused on downtown with customs regarding death and dying, which contributed to the growth of the neighborhood back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's spooky, but not scary like a ghost tour.
Simmons also suggests the twilight tours will offer something new to learn about familiar spots.
"Seeing these buildings and locations at twilight gives them a different character. We can also tell them stories they haven't heard before," Simmons said. "Stories that might be a little different from what we traditionally tell about the downtown area. We're not specifically going for haunted, but we are going for a different view of the history of our downtown area seen at a different time. Literally and figuratively in a different light."
To find out who will visit the tour as part of the living history portion, people need to sign up and attend, Simmons said.
In 2018, the TMS hosted an exhibit about this subject at the Ace of Clubs House and P.J. Ahern Home with a walking tour between the two properties. This time, the focus is more on the walking tour, the outside aspect, Simmons said.
What makes downtown such a fertile territory for a talk about death and dying?
"I think we have this view of the Victorians in particular as being very macabre. That's not unfair to think that from our 21st Century perspective, you know, but it was a completely different time period where death was very much part of life," Simmons said. "The mortality rates were much higher, so all these things were much more part of a person's everyday life than they are now."
Hence, the entire process is seen differently, Simmons said, adding, "It was something that was so common that they did kind of incorporate this whole morbid aspect into their everyday life, and it became something that was almost poetic to them."
Hopefully, she said, people will come away with a better understanding of their perspective.
The Museums System will provide flashlights for the tour, but attendees can bring their own, too. Staff will wear masks and they're suggesting attendees wear them. However, as the tour is outside there's more of a chance to spread out and practice social distancing.
(Tickets: $15 per person, $10 for Texarkana Museums System members. Advance registration is required at www.TexarkanaMuseums.org/Events or the TMS page on Facebook. More info: 903-793-4831.)