Halloween Haunts: The Pandemic Party by Naching T. Kassa

The chill of night filled the air. Shadows ruled the world and not even the plump autumn moon could keep them at bay. Halloween had come at last. The children donned their costumes and sat down to wait in the living room of the 1969 trailer home. The oldest, dressed as Blade, tapped his blue flashlight on the arm of the rocking chair, while his sister, a Day of the Dead Cutie, sat nearby. Their baby brother, clad in a Superman costume glared at them both. I, their guide, entered the room and announced the time had come. They all…

Halloween Haunts: Freakling Forever by T.J. Tranchell

We moved a lot when I was a kid—hell, I’ve kept moving even as an adult—so I’ve managed to lose touch with people quickly. Just before my fifth birthday (maybe just before my sixth?), I went back to one neighborhood to deliver a party invitation to my friend Scotty. His own mid-October birthday party was in full swing, and I was asked to stay. Cake and ice cream commenced followed by a trip to a haunted house. I had never been to a haunted house, but I knew the place we were going. The dilapidated structure sat next to the…

Halloween Haunts: Wicca is Alive and Well in Cleveland by Katherine Kerestman

Park your broomsticks on Broadview Road in the artsy, ethnic, and eclectic Old Brooklyn neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, and visit the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, where museum owner Steven Intermill will tell you about the cache of artefacts collected by the founder of American Wicca, Raymond Buckland. Born in England to a family of Romani heritage and occultist leanings, Raymond Buckland had studied Wicca there under Gerald Gardner (1884 – 1964), the father of modern Wicca. Buckland collected occult objects, which were first housed in a New York City museum in his own basement from 1966 – 1976,…

Halloween Haunts: The Season Begins by Michael J. Moore

It's that stagnant, nocturnal air—nothing close to warm, but not so cold you need a jacket. Those thin clouds, strewn across a pitch-black sky. It's the moon, hovering just out of reach, a sinister grin beaming down from its pockmarked face. Autumn leaves, rotting by the road. It's that first step onto the dewy lawn, decorated with plastic tombstones and spiderweb-covered trees. Your bag bouncing at your side, nowhere near as full as it should be. It's different for us all, I'm sure. For this horror writer, however, Halloween has never had anything to do with ancient myths from far…

Halloween Haunts: Weird Women Take on Halloween: Five Early Halloween Works by Women by Lisa Morton

When we remember holiday ghost tales, we probably go to Charles Dickens and the most famous ghost story of them all, “A Christmas Carol”. Think about Halloween stories, and you might imagine that you’d have to wait until at least the mid-twentieth century, when Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury rolled around. But here’s one of those historical bits that even the most knowledgeable horror fan might have missed: many of the earliest stories about Halloween were by women. That’s right, not long after Dickens tormented Scrooge with Christmas ghosts, his feminine counterparts were setting their spirits loose on Halloween. After…

This October, Halloween Haunts rises again!

From October 1 through October 31, the Horror Writers Association will host an online event to celebrate the month of Halloween and help horror readers and horror writers connect at the eeriest time of the year. All HWA members are invited to participate in this series of daily blog posts, book excerpts, and more. Halloween Haunts offers HWA members a place to share Halloween anecdotes and stories to connect with new readers, spread the word about members’ new works, and raise the profile of the horror genre and the HWA. You can find past posts on our Halloween blog: https://horror.org/category/halloween/……

Halloween Haunts: When Captain Howdy Visits on Halloween: The History of the Ouija Board

By Lisa Morton Whenever I tell people that I’ve written a book about séances, the subject of the Ouija board usually comes up very soon. Ouija boards have fascinated us for almost 130 years now; for the price of a board game, they offer us the promise of communicating with spirits in the comfort of our own living rooms. Unlike a more traditional séance, which must be guided by a medium with some experience or skill, anyone with fingers can use a Ouija board. Ouija boards connect with Halloween in the idea of easing contact with ethereal spirits. Halloween is…

Halloween Haunts: From Birthdays to Doorbells to Arson: Mischief Night

By Kevin Wetmore My mother’s birthday is October 30.  She told us that when she was growing up her parents would throw a Halloween-themed birthday party. My grandmother would call my mother’s friend Bunny’s father, who ran a bakery, to make a Jack-o-lantern cake decorated with plastic witches on broomsticks holding the candles and all sorts of Halloween themed plastic paraphernalia.  (To me that sounds like Heaven).  As a result, however, my mother does not much care for Halloween, as it required her to share her birthday with a national holiday aimed (at the time) at children and she felt…

Halloween Haunts: The Haunter of the Cul de Sac

By Nancy Holder Oh, Halloweens of my childhood, those halcyon days when our parents hardly ever supervised us and had no idea of the traumas we underwent in the name of fun—most of the time. How it is that I have teeth and am still alive is a mystery to me given all the perilous adventures I took myself on. Yet here I am, remembering not a terrifying Halloween tale of menace most shambling, but the Halloween season when my father shared in the soaring triumph and ultimate defeat of the robot costume he made for me when I was…

Halloween Haunts: The Hungry Ghost Festival

By Lee Murray & Geneve Flynn Lee Murray: As a girl, I remember my Kiwi-Chinese mum lighting joss sticks for the spirits of the dead, always three or five slender sticks since those numbers are auspicious. She would hold the sticks in both hands, the tips glowing red, and bow respectfully, before placing the still-burning bamboo on a stand on the windowsill where the aromatic smoke would curl upwards and permeate the kitchen. I loved that smoky scent. And the solemnity of the moment, quiet amid the general busyness of my childhood. It’s a practice that seems out of place…

Halloween Haunts: “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps”

by Frazer Lee In another life, and another time (1998 to be specific) I was hired to work crew for several weeks on a film shoot. The movie production in question was Siamese Cop, which had the awesome logline: ‘Two cops. One jacket’. A low-budget affair (no kidding) the bulk of the shoot was confined to one main location, which would also serve as the production base, equipment store, and – as it turned out – a place to haunt your every waking step. Friern Barnet Mental Hospital, as it was then known, opened its doors as Colney Hatch Asylum…

Halloween Haunts: The Voice and Poe

by Naching T. Kassa   When I think of Halloween, sweet memories come to mind. The scent of caramel apples, the brisk chill of October’s dying breath, horror films flickering on a small screen, and the smooth taste of chocolate on my tongue. These memories are beautiful, but my most favorite is the sound of my dad’s voice reading Edgar Allan Poe. My father loved Poe. Growing up, he’d read every story, from “The Masque of the Red Death” to “The Gold-Bug.” He also loved the movies, and my first introduction to Poe was through the Roger Corman films starring…

Halloween Haunts: Rising from the Dead

by Chris DiLeo Every Halloween, my father rose from the dead. He would wait until his victims were so close there was nowhere they could run, and as those quivering trick-or-treaters’ hands stretched across the open coffin reaching for the individually wrapped Twizzlers splayed across his chest, my father’s eyes would open and he would attack. My father died when I was eleven. Happened right before my eyes. His hand reached out, fingers trembling, and a crackling moan rattled in his throat. His eyes were wide, frightened, and he stumbled and fell. He never got up again. At the funeral…

Halloween Haunts: Can Halloween Be Pandemic Proof?

By Pamela K. Kinney   I always loved Halloween. When people asked me as a child what my favorite holiday was, I knew they expected to hear it was Christmas. I mean, Christmas is Santa Claus, gifts, and other things that excite a kid on this holiday--right? But no, I always answered, "Halloween." Their mouth would drop open, same as did some of my childhood friends. But there was something about Halloween growing up in the Sixties, when in October they brought out the wax Halloween harmonicas, wax vampire lips, and cardboard skeletons and cats to hand on your windows.…

Halloween Haunts: Dive Bombed in a Nightmare

by Damian Serbu Halloween often brings to mind memories of past frights and haunts. As a horror writer, I find myself drawn to moments that scared the crap out of me, so I can relive the intense thrill and ponder anew its meaning. I am not talking about actual-horrific events that I experienced in life, but false alarms or watching a horror movie or going to a haunted house. Something frightening without a real threat of violence to myself. This summer’s publication of The Bachmann Family Secret and the arrival of October has me thinking about one particular recurring nightmare…

Halloween Haunts: Thank You, Horror

by Tom Leveen   The thing is, the non-readers of horror don’t get it. They don’t get our attraction to the darkness, to the monstrous. They don’t get that we, more than they, are attuned to the human condition. To mortality and disease and the unfairness of monsters in our midst. They don’t get that that’s why we write it, why we read it. It’s our inoculation. It’s our telescope and microscope, making the distant loom large and the subtle come to life so that we can study it and, perhaps, sublimate it. We are healthier and stronger for it.…

Halloween Haunts: Everybody is a Book of Blood

By B.R. Yeager   Each October, we immersive ourselves in narrative. Yes, yes—those classic and cult films, those new and beloved books. I don’t need to tell you. Search “best Halloween movies” and Google spits out 186 listicles before asking you to be more specific. Search “best Halloween books” and you get roughly the same result. But an important aspect of this month gets neglected: narratives come unglued from consumerist machinery to spill out into the rest of life. We tell each other stories. One particular house in my neighborhood sticks out: it’s an average bungalow, apart from a large…

Halloween Haunts: Short Stories, Long Journeys – Halloween Lights

by Anna Taborska Halloween has been lucky for me as a writer. The first story of mine ever published was a Halloween-themed story, and it came out in time for Halloween.             When an author publishes a novel through a publisher, they usually sign away their rights for many years, sometimes indefinitely – if they’re not careful. This is generally not the case with short stories, where a publisher might ask for first rights to a book for a year after publication or perhaps even ask for non-exclusive rights to a story. Thus short stories (and the rights to them)…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Then and Now and in the New Now

by Kate Maruyama   We do enjoy Christmas, but the most wonderful time of the year for my family is the Halloween season. When we first moved to the neighborhood, my husband and I would rent a pile of scary movies, and hand out Halloween candy (as well as eat our share of it). Then we had kids. Every season (they’d have to wait ‘til October 1st!) we’d decorate the house, make decorations, fabric ghosts one year, a haunted candy tree another. We’d start making treats, planning costumes (always homemade,) and we’d make a gingerbread Halloween house. This may sound…

Halloween Haunts: On Treats and Tricks

by Christopher Hawkins Trick or treat. We say the words, but we don’t often give a lot of thought to them. They’ve become generic holiday words, not much more than a tidy slogan written in orange on black napkins or spelled out on window clings amid bats and spiders. For the kids that come to the door, they’re the gateway to getting candy in their bags, like the password spoken at the door of a speakeasy. As adults, we say them with a self-aware little laugh, borrowing a bit of that youthful insistence and making it our own, if only…