Halloween Haunts: Halloween Changes Through The (My) Ages by JG Faherty

As a writer with a strong leaning towards horror and dark fiction, it’s only natural that I’m a huge fan of Halloween. In fact, it’s my favorite holiday. The fact that you’re reading this means it’s probably one of yours as well. But I loved Halloween long before I ever thought about putting pen to paper. As a kid, it was the third-best night of the year (coming after Christmas and my birthday), and as I grew older, my love of all things spooky only grew.

However, time has a habit of changing how we look at things. While at the age of 53 I still enjoy Halloween as much as I did at 7, or 17, or even 27, I enjoy it a different way. So rather than talk about my earliest Halloween memories, or how Halloween influenced my writing, or what the true meanings of Halloween are, I’m going to give you something different: the evolution of traditions. My traditions.

The Early Years

Before I reached high school age, I probably celebrated Halloween much like the rest of American kids who grew up before cell phones, the Internet, and flat screen TVs. Bobbing for apples at parties that were always held on a porch or in a basement. Dressing up in cool costumes – super heroes, ghosts, vampires – that were either bought at the Five and Dime store or made by your parents. Coming home with a sack of candy that someone would sort through and toss out all the apples (watch out! Razor blades!) and unwrapped candy. Then you’d go through it yourself, setting aside the nasty candy (black licorice, mints) for someone else. Then you’d organize your pile of chocolate, root beer barrels, and quarters and dig in until your mother yelled at you to stop. The rest of the candy got “put away” and doled out to you over the next few nights.

Beginning at the age of 8 or so, something new got added to the tradition: watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” Back then, it only got shown once during the week before Halloween, and that night became almost as magical as Halloween itself. In those days, before global warming made Halloween temperatures unpredictable, every Halloween seemed the same: just the right amount of chill to mean you needed a sweatshirt under your costume and your breath made clouds in the air, which always smelled of frost and leaf piles and hot chocolate. There’d be the annual trip to the local farm market to get apple cider donuts, hot cider, and a couple of pumpkins to carve into jack-o-lanterns, a messy affair conducted at the picnic table out back, with newspaper covering everything.

Flash forward a few years, and things are beginning to change. We still went trick-or-treating, but by ourselves, not with our parents. We didn’t have to get our candy inspected. And on the night before Halloween, we got to stay outside with Dad and guard the house during Gate Night, to make sure anyone who tried soaping the car windows or tossing eggs at the house got a good blast of icy cold water from the hose. In high school, we became the neighborhood kids who did all the mischief on Gate Night, but that phase didn’t last long, because once we had our licenses we started attending real Halloween parties.

The Roaring Twenties

No, I’m not that old! I’m talking about my twenties. The college years and right after. For me, this was a time of trying to make the ultimate costume. College and bar costume parties were not only competition against friends and strangers, but often came with real prizes. Money prizes. So we really tried to outdo each other, and our own previous costumes, every year. Occasionally, this meant veering into controversial territory, as in the time a group of us went as rabbis and Arabs (a peaceful gathering); that won us first prize at a contest. Other costumes I remember are Samurai warrior, Poo Man, and zombie, complete with worms crawling out of my skin.

Although I hadn’t yet written any fiction, I was a voracious reader in those years, and I had a real interest in the supernatural and the occult. One Halloween season at college, some of us found out that a local group of Wiccans would be having a gathering in the woods just outside of town. We drove there just before midnight on Halloween, eager to see what a real Wiccan ceremony looked like. Unfortunately, we never got to see anything. The police got there ahead of us and broke up the ceremony because of it taking place on state park land, so all we got to see was a bunch of people dressed in dark robes being forced to get into their cars and leave.

In those pre-thirties years, the best thing about Halloween was that it lasted for a week, thanks to different parties at different places. Still, some of the old traditions remained. I still watched old Charlie Brown get his rocks, and I’d usually find the time to go for cider donuts.

The Mid-Life Crisis

From my early thirties to my mid-forties, Halloween became a private celebration. We were too old to do the bar scene. A lot of my friends were married, and now they were the ones escorting their kids trick-or-treating or throwing parties for the neighborhood children. Once in a while someone would have an adult party, but they didn’t have the thrill of Halloween days gone by. Instead, it was just the same old people as any other get together, just with some decorations thrown in. And since none of my friends were as manic about Halloween as I was, the decorations were usually pretty lame.

I got married at forty, to a wonderful woman who unfortunately wasn’t into Halloween at all. If we went to a party, I had to beg her to wear a costume. She didn’t understand why I still wanted to watch Charlie Brown, or have a monster movie marathon. She did enjoy the buying and carving of the pumpkins, a tradition I revived when I got my first house, and so our Halloweens together created some new traditions out of the old ones: trips to local craft fairs (for cider donuts and cider!), dressing up our dogs in cute costumes.

But over the next few years, my influence over her grew stronger. I became a published horror author, so it made sense in a way to decorate the house. Exposure to classic horror movies (some good, some awful) sparked her own interest in scary films. And, now that our friends’ children are grown, house parties became adult affairs again. Old traditions and new melded, forming something that the older me, and the kid me still living deep inside my heart, both enjoy.

The Golden Years

Today, Halloween is better than ever for me, and my wife enjoys it almost as much as I do. On October 1st, we break out the Halloween decorations and house gets filled with zombies, skeletons, and ghouls. Each year we add a couple more. As the weather turns crisp, we head out on the weekends to go hiking or visit farmer’s markets. We still enjoy those same apple cider donuts with a cup of hot cider, we still pick our own pumpkins and apples and grapes, and then make jack-o-lanterns and pies. Almost every night in the month includes watching a horror movie, thanks to AMC and TCM and HBO. The only rule is it has to be made before 1985.

On Halloween weekend we throw a “comfort party.” We have 10 or 20 people over and serve comfort food – chili, 6-cheese mac and cheese, pulled chicken or pork – plus my “famous” graveyard pudding (ask me for the recipe, I’m glad to share). We sit out in the backyard around the firepit until 11 or so, and then go inside for a double-feature of 2 classic horror films from the 60s. Usually Hammer, but sometimes one of the Italian movies will slip in. It’s like our own private MST3K.

And yes, I still watch “The Great Pumpkin” at least once during the month. Some things never change.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: JG Faherty is giving away three e-books, winners’ choice of his novels (The Burning Time, Carnival of Fear, Cemetery Club, Ghosts of Coronado Bay) or his novellas (Castle by the Sea, Fatal Consequences, Thief of Souls, The Cold Spot, He Waits). Comment below to enter.

JG Faherty is a Bram Stoker Award® and ITW Thriller Award nominee and the author of four novels, seven novellas, and more than 50 short stories. His most recent titles are FATAL CONSEQUENCES, CASTLE BY THE SEA, and THIEF OF SOULS. He writes adult and YA horror/sci-fi/fantasy, and his works range from quiet, dark suspense to over-the-top comic gruesomeness. He enjoys urban exploring, photography, classic B-movies, good wine, and pumpkin beer. As a child, his favorite playground was a 17th-century cemetery, which many people feel explains a lot. His personal motto is “Photobombing people since 1979!” He currently chairs the HWA’s Library and Literacy programs. You can follow him at www.twitter.com/jgfaherty, www.facebook.com/jgfaherty, http://about.me/jgfaherty, and www.jgfaherty.com.

“JG Faherty delves into the Old Ones in LEGACY, a compelling coming-of-age story that tests the merit of a future god. I loved it!” —Rena Mason, Bram Stoker Award® winning author of THE EVOLUTIONIST and EAST END GIRLS.

“LEGACY is a page turning roller coaster ride that keeps you guessing till the end. Faherty has captured the heart of Lovecraftian fiction, while injecting his own devilish creativity for which he is so highly regarded. Recommended enthusiastically to anyone who loves a good tale of the ancient and the arcane.” – Brett J. Talley, Bram Stoker Award® –nominated author of THAT WHICH SHOULD NOT BE and THE VOID

Excerpt from Legacy, coming in winter, 2014 from Samhain Publishing

I awoke to bright June sunshine. A quick glance at my alarm clock showed I’d slept for almost nine hours, something of a miracle for me. I was a habitual early riser, unlike many of my so-called peers. I’ve always felt time spent lounging in bed was time wasted. And since I rarely stayed up late, I had no problem getting enough sleep and still being up before eight on the weekends.

I rolled out from under the covers and uttered a gasp that would have turned into a scream if I’d had the breath for it.

Staring at me from my second-floor window was a writhing mass of scabrous, sewage-green tentacles. A gaping maw, lined with row upon row of thin, needle-like teeth, occupied the center of this degenerate monstrosity. Each gray denticle dripped a thick, syrupy, amber-colored liquid, which I instinctively knew to be poisonous.

I blinked and the alien visage was gone.

Without thinking, I crossed the room and threw open the window, torn between a dreadful desire to see the creature again -and prove I hadn’t been hallucinating – and a desperate fear that it hadn’t been there at all.

I needed to assure myself it had been real, for to have imagined such a thing as the creature I’d seen surely meant I was suffering some sort of breakdown.

Leaning out the window as far as I dared, until almost half my body stuck out into space, I turned this way and that, looking in all directions for the beast. Nothing in my field of vision seemed out of the ordinary. Mrs. Johnson next door was weeding her flowerbed, her heavy-set body clad in its usual housecoat. To my right, the Bronson twins were drawing on the sidewalk in colored chalk and squealing with innocent laughter. Far to my left, the choppy waters of the Atlantic cast thousands of sparkling reflections this way and that.

No one was screaming in terror or running for their lives.

“There you are, sleepy-head.”

My mother’s voice gave me such a start that I had to clutch at the windowsill to avoid tumbling to the lawn below.

“Late night,” I replied, withdrawing back to the safety of the room, my heart hammering against my ribs. “For all of us.” She glanced around at the piles of clothing, books, and adolescent detritus that hid most of the floor around my bed. “Go fix yourself something to eat and then clean up this pig sty you call a room.”

I’d been fixing my own breakfast for several years now, something my mother had insisted on since it allowed her to ‘do other things in the morning.’ Normally, I was fine with it. Cereal, toast, eggs – all the basics – were well within my limited culinary skill set. If I happened to be in a good mood, I might even fix something for my brother, too. However, I had the sudden desire to let someone else take care of my gustatory needs, an unusual yearning to have someone wait on me.

“Could you fix me something? I’ll have bacon and eggs. And toast. With orange juice.”

“Bacon and eggs? I don’t have time…”

Her words trailed off as she stared at me. At the same moment, I felt a tickle inside my nose and caught a glimpse of movement in the lower periphery of my vision, a blurred object that appeared and disappeared again.

For one brief second, my mother’s eyes grew wide. Then the look of alarm left her face, so quickly I couldn’t be sure if I’d actually seen it.

“Sure, Sean. I’ll fix that right away. You go wash up.” She turned and left, leaving me with a host of unanswered questions and strong desire to see myself in a mirror.

I hurried to the bathroom. The face that stared back looked…normal.

It was me.

Sandy hair, the same color as all the men in my family. Light brown eyes, decent looking enough when not distorted behind the thick glasses I had to resort to when my contacts bothered me. Ordinary nose and mouth. Same old ears, which I’d always thought were a little too large for my head, so I kept my hair long enough to hide that particular flaw.

I reached a hand up to smooth down my sleep-disheveled hair and froze.

A faint spiderweb of blue veins covered my palm. In the mirror, the back of my hand appeared to have a dead-flesh gray hue. I turned the offending appendage back and forth, blinking several times to see if this vision would follow the tentacled monster back into oblivion.

Nothing had changed.

I touched a finger from my other hand to the corpse-like skin. Nausea rolled in my stomach when I saw that both hands similarly affected by the same condition. The abnormal coloring extended from my fingertips to just above the wrist. I pushed, prodded, and scratched at different areas. Everything felt the same. I held both hands in front of me, turning them over. The nails were an even darker shade of bluish-gray, as if starved of oxygen. I spread my fingers and discovered that a flap of extra flesh, so thin I could see through it, now filled about a quarter-inch at the base of every gap between the digits. Tiny blue and green capillaries pulsed in the membranes.

It was all too much for me.

“Mom!” I pounded down the stairs, not waiting for her to come to my rescue. She was in the kitchen, melting butter in a frying pan. “Mom!” My voice had risen to a whiny, pre-teen octave, but I didn’t care.

“What’s the matter?” She put the pan down.

“Look!” I held my frighteningly deformed hands out to her.

“Look at what?” She stared first at them, then at me, a blank expression on her face.

“Don’t you see?” I shook them at her. I could hear the hysterical tone in my voice, but I couldn’t control it.

“I see dirty hands. I thought I told you to wash up.”

Her calm tones and complete obliviousness to my physical abnormality made me pause. My mother was a lot of things, but under-protective wasn’t one of them. All Owen or I had to do was sneeze near her and she’d be passing out Vitamin C tablets and telling us to put on a heavier shirt.

There was no way she wouldn’t notice something as drastic as my hands suddenly turning into something more at home on a salamander or frog. And if she had noticed it, she’d have already packed me into the car for a trip to the emergency room.

Was it just my imagination acting up again, like the flying squid-thing? Was I seeing things that weren’t there?

“Never mind.” I went to the kitchen sink and washed my hands. They stayed fish-belly gray. I forced myself ignore them, even though I could feel the webbing bending and stretching as rubbed the soap across them.

I sat down at the table. My appetite was gone, but I poked at my eggs and toast until my mother left to go run errands. I did my best not to look down at my amphibious appendages, fearful I might vomit right there in the kitchen.

After she left, I held my hands up again. They hadn’t changed back to normal, at least not that I could see. Assuming, of course, that they’d actually transformed at all.

“Maybe I’m really just imagining it,” I whispered to the empty kitchen.

There was one way to find out. I decided to go outside. If I’d really mutated into something abnormal, surely someone would notice. All I had to do was make sure people saw me; if they screamed and ran away, I was becoming a monster. If they ignored me, I was crazy.

Some set of choices. Hideous beast or lunatic. I wasn’t sure what I should be hoping for.