Genius loci of the stadium

Text & Illustration Hola Angero
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Marimesa Stadium, the franchise of the Totugal Brooknose baseball team, will soon be 100 years old and is currently under consideration for rebuilding. With such a history, naturally at least one ghost lives there. There is an open room behind the players' waiting room in the basement of the home side, which is rumoured to be inhabited by the ghost of a 13-foot-tall outfielder.

No one has ever seen this ghost. However, about 70 years ago, an old glove the size of a lotus leaf was found in the players' toilets in the basement. Based on the size of this glove, a guess was made and a 13-foot legend was born, wrote a local newspaper of the time. But that cannot be laughed off as a myth. The stadium was built in the first place so that ghosts could inhabit it.

The concrete used to build the stadium was made of limestone from the Marde Gras mountains, at the behest of the owner of the team at the time, Theodora F. Brooknose. Marde Gras is famous as the old battlefield of the War of Continental Supremacy, where 70,000 men died on both sides combined. Theodora thought, ‘The limestone, soaked with the blood and ghosts of brave men, must be on the side of our army.’

The ghosts were identified by Uertzg Faltert Munzer, a history teacher at the local high school, who wanted to find out who these ghosts were. Mr Munzer was also a keen local historian and thought that this ghost story would be at the heart of his research. In a fit of desperation, he stole a duplicate key from the stadium guardroom at 3am, when the stadium guard was asleep, and snuck into a locked room behind the players' waiting room in the basement.

The room was a storage room for old scorebooks. The resentment of tens and hundreds of thousands of players, with their resilient bodies and ripping ambitions, their disappointment, frustration and despair were sealed in symbols and numbers, and their resentment swirled around. Worse still, the ghosts of the dead of the War for Continental Supremacy, summoned along with the concrete, were mixed into the mix, creating the evil 13-foot ghosts.

Poor Dr Munzer was instantly parsed into symbols and numbers by the ghosts' curse and washed into the river that runs beneath the stadium. Later, only Dr Munzer's two ears remained. This was cut out by the ghost of the Captain of the Continental War of Supremacy, in his ‘usual habit’. As a sign of victory in battle, the Captain always cut off the ears of his enemies and wore them on his hat along with a feather ornament. This was a remnant of that habit.

PICTURE BOOK STUDIO #001
2024.9.29