Commercial Auto Dealers

As promised, here is a continuation of the discussion of the Texas Frightmare Weekend that took place in Irving, Texas this past weekend.

Lloyd Cryer, the organizer and director of the event, is an avid horror movie fan and enjoys anything dealing with the macabre. He started the convention just a couple years ago by organizing an email and phone campaign. He began calling and contacting people in the horror movie industry and, as a result, more than 1,500 people attended the first Texas Frightmare Weekend. The first Texas Frightmare Weekend had several horror-related celebrities as well. Sid Haig from Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses appeared to sign autographs.

Within two years, the event was attracting more than 6,000 horror fans. This year, people were lined up outside the ticket booth to buy tickets. Many of them came to get an autograph from Alice Cooper. Others were excited to hear Linda Blair, star of The Exorcist, discuss her love of rescuing and rehabilitating abandoned animals through her Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation. All the money she received for her appearance at the event went toward her charitable cause. Still others appreciated the various exhibits and displays of Cadillac hearses and other death-related merchandise.

Come back on Friday for the third and last part of our series discussing the Texas Frightmare Weekend.

If you’re a fan of the macabre, you probably would have enjoyed the Texas Frightmare Weekend that took place between May 1 and 3 at the Sheraton Grand Hotel DFW Airport in Irving, Texas. The event is a horror convention that features stars typically associated with horror and other things, including Cadillac hearses and much more.

The Texas Frightmare Weekend has been an annual event since 2006. This year, Alice Cooper and Linda Blair were the headlining celebrities, but there were 25 others as well. In addition, there were 150 vending tables that sold death-related and morbid items to add to the ambience of the convention.

The convention kicked off with many people dressed as zombies doing a one-mile walk to the site of the event. A large number of hearses accompanied them to the convention center to set up for the Hearse and Shock Rod Show which took place Saturday afternoon. Inside the Sheraton, hundreds of people walked around dressed in black while others had scary costumes to represent their favorite horror character from a movie or real life. Others made themselves look like the walking dead by sticking fake axes in their head or knives in their chest.

There was too much going on at the event to squeeze into one blog post. Come back on Wednesday for some more facts about the Texas Frightmare Weekend.

You probably have not seen too many women driving Cadillac hearses for your local funeral home, but the trend is growing and it seems to be a nice change of pace.

As more young women are earning their degrees in mortuary science, one of the tasks they must become accustomed to is driving the hearses for grieving families. Desirae Albus, a 23-year-old student at Des Moines Area Community College is doing just that. She loves the funeral business and comforting the loved ones of departed relatives and friends. “It’s kind of a work of art, if you think about it,” she explains.

But Albus is not alone. According to an article in The Northwestern, women “are increasingly the ones who see off the dead.” However, men still comprise about 75 percent of the funeral workers in the United States. However, women are quickly gaining on that percentage. In 2007, about 60 percent of the 2,500 enrollees in mortuary science programs were women, according to the American Board of Funeral Service Education.

One reason for the change in the industry is because the funeral business is slowly becoming less of a family business. Many people entering the funeral business are doing it fresh without being exposed to it in a family-type setting.

We’ll write more about this trend in the weeks to come. Be sure to come back for more discussion!