Jim Thorpe’s Historic Race Street celebrates Halloween, Edgar Allen Poe and the release of ‘Voices of the Hollow Maze,’ a haunting tale by Race Street artist David Watkins Price

The Friends of Historic Race Street will illuminate exquisitely carved pumpkins on Friday, Oct. 26 at 11:30 p.m. to make this particular midnight not quite so dreary. For as the clock in the courthouse tower strikes 12, Edgar Allen Poe, as portrayed by Race Street resident and literary historian Edward Moran, will visit the Rex house for a midnight reading of The Raven and excerpts from The Bells.

 The Rex House at 29 Race Street is home to Three Mountains Gallery and acclaimed artist David Watkins Price. The gallery will be open to the public from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 27 and Sunday, Oct. 28. for a showing of prints from the artist’s recently released eBook Voices of the Hollow Maze.

 With drawings, etchings and 19^th century images, Voices of the Hollow Maze, by David Watkins Price, is an elegy for Mauch Chunk, a town that is no more. Published as an eBook by Amazon.com, it tells the story of a young printmaker, who buying a house at the bottom of a dark valley discovers it to be haunted. The haunting takes the form of voices heard in the house after the printmaker falls down a tiny stair that climbs to the attic, the night his friends play with the Ouija Board.

An old lady from the historical society suggests he write the words down. “Writing words down is an offering of some kind,” she says, “an offering to things unseen.” Writing the words down, the printmaker is no longer afraid and a town lost in the past is reborn as a diamond place, a place people come, after they’ve experienced the “cosmic terror.”

Price’s Voices of the Hollow Maze was inspired not only by his experiences in his Stone Row home but also by the 3 a.m. rolling 32 years ago of a 500 pound granite ball from atop the Edward Rex monument in the Mauch Chunk Cemetery and its half-mile descent to Race Street, where the family had lived for decades.

 Advance ticket reservations required for Edgar Allen Poe’s visit to the Rex House, 29 Race Street, on Friday, Oct. 26. Refreshments will be served.