When I wrote Spinsterella: Goth Girl Summer in 2024, I planned for it to be a light novel that featured pictures, and an article from Gothic Beauties magazine asking: What Happened To Mad Matilda? chronicling everything Matilda did over the course of her vacation. Unfortunately, the book I planned to be 50,000 words and 300 pages became 144,000 words and 666 pages. So I had to cut some things to get it to fit Amazon's requirements for paperbacks. And one of those things was the article that would've been featured with the Gothic Beauties Magazine cover. Well, I hate to see good content go to waste. So I'm sharing that article here with you now.
Here's the article that would've been featured in with the Gothic Beauties Magazine cover:
What Happened to Mad Matilda?
She was the queen of the Industrial Goth raves. And then she disappeared.
In the 1990s Mad Matilda was One of the most popular hostesses in the Industrial Goth Rave scene. Considered to be the Downtown Julie Brown of the Industrial Goth scene, she was known for her legendary parties that would kick off once she jumped off the makeshift stage of the warehouse where they were hosted.
Mad Matilda was the life of the party from 1991 to 1995. Goths and Normies would travel across the country to go to her parties. Even some celebrities would pop in to join the festivities. Everyone was having fun until Mad Matilda had her last party at VampJam95, the last party Mad Matilda hosted before she mysteriously disappeared.
Years after VampJam 95 people wondered what happened to Mad Matilda. In that time people have speculated about her disappearance from the Goth scene. Some thought she got married and had kids. Others thought she wound up on drugs. And a few thought she died.
What really happened to Mad Matilda? Well, she’s here to tell Gothic Beauties her story.
Mad Matilda is actually Matilda Crowley, a Black girl next door who lives in Harlem. The daughter of a White college professor and a Black human resource manager, she came into the Goth scene in 1989. Living in a real-life horror movie during the crack epidemic, Matilda took a journey into the Goth scene after her brother was shot at a house party and she got suspended from school from for fighting the bullies who tormented her for being light skinned. After meeting a Goth named Lady Diabolique who was attending Columbia University where her father taught during that suspension from school, she decided to become The Black Widow, her take on horror movie characters to combat the real life monsters she encountered in real life such as bullies who harassed her in high school drug dealers who made advances on her.
After overcoming her issues and transferring to a new school, Matilda took on the Goth name Mad Matilda. The Black Widow pendant she wears was given to her by Goth friends who supported her during the hard times she encountered during her babybat years. As Matilda transitioned from being The Black Widow to Mad Matilda, she and her friends planned Raves to give Babybats like the then sixteen-year-old Matilda a safe place to be able to experience the Goth scene since there weren’t many places for people under the age of 18 to attend Goth Nights back then.
Mad Matilda and her friends hosted their raves at a warehouse on 12th Avenue in Harlem after she graduated from high school. It’s there they usually coordinated to be events where babybats could experience the scene and up and coming bands could get an audience for their music. Matilda’s Raves connected lots of babybats to new music and helped many more learn about the Goth scene. However, these events drew the ire of The NYPD and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani who was looking to eradicate the public nuisance of Mad Matilda as part of his quality-of-life initiative. Ironically it was that initiative that led to the disappearance of Mad Matilda.
On a cold February night in 1995, Mad Matilda was looking to start one of her parties when she found a babybat strung out on ecstasy at in the bathroom of the warehouse where she hosted her events. When she found out a drug dealer was selling drugs at her party, she had him ejected to keep him from selling drugs to other babybats. Unfortunately, that effort to maintain a quality of life at her party led to the drug dealer calling the cops at the precinct. When the police raided the party, Mad Matilda got arrested.
Before her arrest, Matilda had plans to be a part of the Goth scene after she graduated college. She had plans to be a hostess at Goth clubs all across the country. Sadly, those plans got derailed with her arrest. While Matilda was able to make a plea deal to avoid any jail time for hosting her Raves, she needed the help of her parents to get out of the predicament she was in. And as part of that deal with them, she couldn’t be Mad Matilda anymore.
While that arrest ended Mad Matilda’s reign over the Industrial Goth Raves it didn’t stop Matilda from being a part of the Goth scene. As Matilda graduated from Columbia University in 1995 with a degree in economics, she started on a new path in the subculture. The day after coming home after her community service was over, she was watching a Jenny Jones episode and saw how Goths were being mistreated and the scene was misrepresented. It was after watching that episode that she got inspired to become a different kind of role model for Goths. With the help of her parents, she was able to secure a job at a corporation in Manhattan. And for that new role in the Goth scene, she took on a new goth name: Spinsterella.
Matilda sees her transition from Mad Matilda to Spinsterella similar to the DC comic book character Dick Grayson. When Dick Grayson was a child he was Batman’s sidekick Robin. And as he got older, he outgrew being Batman’s partner and became his own hero Nightwing. In some ways Matilda was a sidekick to her best friend Goth Lady Diabolique in her babybat days as a teenager, but as she became a woman, she’s become a Black Widow with her own approaches to Goth and her own style.
In her new role in the Goth scene, Matilda has been working to be an ambassador who presents a positive image of the subculture on the job and off. Recently she began to come out of the office of the company she’s working at to do some modeling for online Goth retailer Gothshop.com, is going to pose for a calendar as Miss October and has also won first place for the Venice Beach Bikini Contest.
What happened to Mad Matilda? She became an older, wiser woman who shows us all how someone can still be Goth as an adult. Many people think Goth is a phase teenagers go through when they’re feeling angsty. However, Matilda is an example of how a person can live a great life and stay spooky in all aspects of it.
Matilda may not be the Queen of the Industrial Goth Raves anymore, but she’s still Goth royalty. As she’s jumped off the makeshift stage of the warehouse and landed on her feet in the world she’s grown up she’s become an Lady with class and style who represents the best of the subculture and the scene.
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