Halloween Haunts: Transcending Tropes by Kodie Van Dusen

To say that I never saw myself writing horror is an understatement. My earliest memory of horror was at my best friend’s birthday when we were children. I don’t remember exactly how old we were, but I doubt we could have been much older than ten. A gaggle of girls huddled in her basement for a sleepover (which was already something that made me uneasy, being the introverted homebody that I was) to watch a special movie picked out by the birthday girl. The film? Halloween. You can imagine how well that went over with me, watching Michael Myers running…

Halloween Haunts: October Baby by Melissa Pleckham

Like many people born in October — all of us beauty-loving Libras, all of those mysterious, sexy Scorpios — I grew up thinking that Halloween was my special holiday. Like I had some sort of corner on the market. Some of my earliest memories involve inhaling the smell of greasepaint and latex masks in drugstores, crunching through the corpses of once-green leaves piled on lawns in knee-deep mounds, the dull sweetness of soft wax lips clutched tightly between my own baby teeth. My childhood birthday parties further blurred the line between birthday and Halloween, especially as I got older, serving…

Halloween Haunts: A Taste of Halloween Beyond – The Talking-board by Lisa Morton

I’ve written a lot of Halloween fiction, and I do mean A LOT. As in, I’ve already had one entire collection of just Halloween short stories and novellas – The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats – published (by JournalStone) in 2017, and I’ve written a bunch of new Halloween fiction since. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that I’m both a horror fiction writer and an expert on Halloween history (with three non-fiction books on that subject to my credit). When I’m asked to contribute a new Halloween story to something, I always stop first to think about some…

Halloween Haunts: Believing Myself to be a Writer by John James Lane

I always wanted to be a writer, but deep inside for most of my life, I was constantly in a struggle with my own demons. Demons of being “less than”. Once when I was in sixth grade, our English teacher wanted us to write a story. In a ruled notebook, I chose one in which a knight fought a dragon, a basic medieval type story. After she reviewed all our stories, she handed the notebooks back, one by one. When it was my turn, she had a smile on her face. The page with the ending had words marked in…

Halloween Haunts: Like All That Lives, We Eat Death: The TTRPG by Emily Flummox

I came home for the first time to celebrate Samhain, one week after someone died there, on that land.   If I were ever to write a tabletop role-playing game based on Halloween, I think I’d forego the use of dice or cards or resource management, all those usual ways by which TTRPGs introduce chance into their narratives.  Instead, I think I would instruct the players to cover up all their clock faces, remove all their watches, turn off phones and computers, and when they wanted their character to do something, they would peek at the time, the ones digit…

Halloween Haunts: Of Horror, Hope, and Halloween by Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray

There is nothing that says ‘horror’ more than the Halloween holidays. Ask any fan of all things macabre for their favourite time of year and their obvious response is October, the Season of the Witch. Take this annual blog series, for example. Halloween Haunts exists as a celebration, a cornerstone of the horror writing community, a time of year when all of our passions are distilled into a month of festivities. For horror fans, especially writers, Halloween lauds the awe and wonder of the fantastic and the innate terror of something unknown and otherworldly, and in doing so has us…

Halloween Haunts: Hauntingly Normal by Susan Schwartz

Writing and researching the paranormal always seemed natural to me after growing up in a haunted house. We moved after the previous owner had passed away. She was a sweet elderly lady, who was well-loved in the neighborhood. The owner didn’t want it empty for too long a time. Being right down the street, the move didn’t take too long at all. I noticed the strange sensations after a couple of weeks. Nothing specific, I would just get weird feelings about the house and the strange noises it made, especially after dark. Why is it always after dark? Footsteps down…

Halloween Haunts: Beheading Delight by Rosemary Thorne

I love to time-travel to be beheaded: I use the thin veils that Halloween procures for the living and the dead to go through the portals after pronouncing the right words and spells. For a good decapitation, my favorite destination is London 17th century. I used to go to Paris 18th century just because it has a better reputation, madame Guillotine and all. Still, after a couple of decades of being chopped off in continental Europe, I began to look for a different experience. I don't know: the French became too passionate for my taste. I look forward to a…

Halloween Haunts: A Halloween Urban Legend: The Bunnyman by Pamela K. Kinney

Everyone knows the urban legends of the man with the hook in Lover’s Lane, the Halloween campus murder, and the babysitter story. Still here in Virginia, we have the Bunnyman. This serial killer wears a bunny costume. I know; you ask what’s scary about someone dressed as the Easter Bunny? What does he even have to do with Halloween anyway? Well, for one thing, he carries a hatchet, and not an Easter basket of decorated eggs. You never want to meet him at the Bunnyman Bridge when the clock strikes midnight on Halloween. Otherwise, he might add you to his…

Halloween Beyond: Beyond Last Year’s Haunt by Kate Maruyama

Last year, I wrote a Halloween Haunts about my favorite Halloween traditions at my friend Miguel’s house, and how I missed it so much during the pandemic. Last winter, I wrote a novella set against that very Halloween, starring Beto, the King of Halloween, based on Miguel. The novella: Halloween Beyond: A Gentleman’s Suit, is part of a triptych of novellas by myself, Lisa Morton and Lucy A. Snyder. Each novella is its own story but all pass through a Halloween Superstore called Halloween Beyond and all our protagonists encounter a tricksy clerk there, named Maeve. A Gentleman’s Suit takes…

Halloween Haunts: What if the Creepy Devil Mask at Your Halloween Party is not a Costume, but is Actually the Face of God? by Katherine Kerestman

An excerpt from Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards by Katherine Kerestman (WordCrafts Press, 2020), in which Creepy Cat visits the Yucatan: The irresistible dark mystery of the pre-Columbian Yucatan peninsula was what beckoned me to Mexico. To this end I booked a hotel in Cancun, which was to be my jumping-off place for an exploration of the eerie secrets of the people who used to live there. The balcony of my Caribbean-facing room afforded a lovely view of melded blue sky and sea, white foaming waves rolling onto the sand. On the…

Halloween Haunts: Bane Herbs in Fiction by Heddy Johannesen

Do you want to write about bane herbs in your stories? Let me navigate that dangerous territory with you. I will discuss how you can write about bane herbs in your novellas and horror novels accurately. This post tells how to have your character using these herbs, if that character is a witch, warlock or one of the cunning folk, you can portray your character using these herbs the right way if you read this. Bane herbs mean poisonous or toxic herbs. The most beautiful plants are often the deadliest. The plants listed below certainly fall in that category. That…

Halloween Haunts: You Look Like Death by Kayla Woods

What is the most dangerous part of Halloween? The lore of Halloween attempts to instill in us the fear of razor blades in apples and needles in chocolate bars. We have learned that most children do not have to worry about falling prey to these dangers. Realistically, parents should worry about their children crossing the street without looking while wearing a dark costume. Pet parents need to ensure that bowls of chocolate candies are not left unattended around opportunistic pups. Anyone wearing a costume around a lit Jack-O-lantern should take care to not catch fire. When I Googled the phrase…

Halloween Haunts: The Spooky Place by Stephen Mark Rainey

From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, the local chapter of the Jaycees in my Virginia hometown put on an annual haunted castle event, set in a massive, abandoned warehouse in a nearby hamlet called Koehler (which could well have qualified as a real-life model for H.P. Lovecraft’s Dunwich). The old warehouse is a hulking stone monstrosity set in a forested area on the banks of the Smith River. No matter the season, the place looks like an honest-to-god haunted castle. For Halloween, one could hardly choose a more imposing and appropriate location to host a fearsome good time. From the…

Halloween Haunts: For the Love of a (Mostly) Black Cat by Sumiko Saulson

On October 31, 2009 something magical happened. That was the day that my then-fiance Gregory Hug and I adopted the approximately three-year-old predominantly black tuxedo cat we would come to know as Bootsy Catlins from Oakland Animal Services. We had been looking for a cat on Craiglist when we found a special Oakland Animal Services had on black and mostly black cats for Halloween. As a couple of goths, we were completely tickled by the idea of adopting a black cat, so we came in. The kind woman working at Oakland Animal Services explained to us that thousands of years…
SALE! Special Ad Rate Extended for the HWA Newsletter

SALE! Special Ad Rate Extended for the HWA Newsletter

The HWA Newsletter is offering a special rate on full-page ads for the rest of 2021! All issues are jam-packed with lots of goodies (columns, special articles, puzzles, photos, artwork, poems), so you don’t want to miss out on advertising in it! Full Page Ad 650px wide by any height – only $25! The ad deadline for this sale is December 31, 2021. Order yours today!

Halloween Haunts: Real Life Halloween Candymen by Sumiko Saulson

If you have read Clive Barker’s “Forbidden” or seen either of the Candyman movies, you know that one of gut-wrenching images in the story is that of razorblades buried in candy. Director Nia DaCosta uses that imagery to particularly disturbing effect in Candyman (2021), the body horror special effects masterpiece that earned her a place in history as the first Black woman director of a #1 Box Office smash. The movie has impressive horror writing chops. DaCosta co-wrote it with Win Rosenfeld and two-time Bram Stoker Award winner Jordan Peele, who picked up the award for Best Screenplay in 2017…

Halloween Haunts: Full Circle Halloween by Yvonne Navarro

When I was a kid... You know what the first thought that popped into my head was when I typed that? “Get off my lawn!” Which is not at all where I want this to go. In Chicago, in the 1960s and 1970s—there, I’ve dated myself and so what—kids used to go trick-or-treating pretty much fearless. Late into the night, too—I remember knocking on doors at close to ten p.m. (and yeah, the adults who opened were pretty grumpy). The year to year weather was varied: if Halloween fell on a Saturday or Sunday, you could be laughing and running…

Halloween Haunts: The October Blues by Amaris J. Gagnon

October was here and Halloween was right around the corner. Fall time was my favorite season because I loved all things spooky and horror. I was fourteen and right at the edge of when kids stop going trick or treating. As an eighth-grader, I noticed my friends wanting to wear more revealing costumes. I guess it wasn’t cool to dress up as vampires or ghosts anymore. The more cleavage the better and the higher you could roll up your skirt the more Myspace comments you got. Things were tough at home. My mother had lost her job and my father’s…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Goal by Sèphera Girón

Halloween is always a fun time for horror lovers whether you’re a creator or a consumer or both. This Halloween may be a bit different where you are because many parts of the world are still in a pandemic or lockdown or just coming out of one and so on. And of course, many parts of the world don’t celebrate Halloween. This Halloween, try doing some self-care in-between all the festivities, if you are able to get to any. Halloween night instead of being sad you still can’t go clubbing or dancing or attend a giant Halloween party or even…