HIDDEN FROM VIEW Coffin Beast's Pathology My fasination for the morbid came to life in a small, north Texas town called Sulphur Springs.  This is where my great-grandparents owned and operated a mortuary.  By the time I came along, it had been converted into a house.  It was a beautiful three story, pre-civil war mansion.  It had a library, wrap around porch, chapel and many bedrooms.  The most wonderful thing it boasted was a cemetery in the back yard.  My cousins and I use to play Ghost in the Graveyard for hours on end, usually deep into the night.  The lower level was off limits to the children, but we always managed to escape down there on certain occasions.  This is where my great-grandfather use to embalm the dead of Sulphur Springs.  The table was still there; the porcelain still with the taint of blood and death.  The embalming machine was off in the corner awaiting the time it could stick and drain another body of its precious fluids only to replace it with its own special sauce.  The morgue freezers where still down there, but they had not worked for years.  Only the slide out tables still operated as they did so many years before.  I could only imagine how many bodies that room must have seen.  Many of the days in my youth were spent dreaming up scenarios in which my great-grandfather had played out in his little labratory.  Since my youth I have studied the effects of death (both physically and emotionally) on the human psyche.  I was a pre-med student when I first entered college.  I was studying to be Forensic Pathologist.  I abandoned this path, for one a little more esoteric; anthropology.  I pursued this until graduation.  I now explore the darker side of our world as an amateur ghost hunter.  I am found frequenting cemeteries all over my state.  I find cemeteries to be calm and peaceful; no one around to bother you.  I have on many occasions found myself in the vaults of the dead beneath the ground.  The cloy stench of mixed earth and moisture.  The old, rotting smell of marble and wood.  I want to visit Europe one of these days to see what a truly old cemetery has to offer one of my curiousity.  This is just a little about me.  I might write more, but please continue to read on to the other sections where I have included some of my original poetry and stories.  See you on the other side...