Halloween

Hope sprang eternal for my father, because every autumn, he’d take my siblings and I to our area’s haunted houses. Designed to raise money for charity and peopled by local talent, including many kids, these weren’t what one could call high theatre, nor were the scares elevated affairs. However, since I was a child with a far-too-active imagination, I conjured all sorts of terrors. There were the obligatory witches who feasted on the flesh of children. Headless Hessians mounted Nightmares. Mummies dragged bandaged legs to enact ages-old curses. Creatures, monsters, ghosts, and Dracula. Hammer-style bloodbaths and immortal killers intent on…

One of my earliest memories of spending time with my mom was also my first ever haunted house. I was probably the youngest person in line, but I was over the moon to venture out with my mom and her friends to prove I was fearless. I had made it all the way through the line, even with some very animated characters, creepy light effects and bloodcurdling screams coming from within the house looming in front of us. We were finally at the front, ready to enter the scary haunted house. It didn’t take long until I was absolutely in…

...I might yet fall victim to a future Friday the 13th.   One night, long ago (the early '00s), in a place not so far away (Erie and Edinboro, Pennsylvania)... My late best friend, may he rest in peace, once shared with our little college group a wicked cool tree. This huge, gnarled specimen of unknown species invaded the ground with dark, barky tendrils; from its colossal bole-torso reached giant, twisted limb-branches; in the fall, these bare branches extended into thin, insidious offshoots ending in skeletal wood-fingers and bark-nails. All 'round this Witch Tree, as it was dubbed, lay the…

What if I could become the monster of a horror film? Perhaps a lot of kids growing up in the 1980s fantasized about the question; many youngsters must have pondered the idea in their make believe realms. But for me the question contained more potency. More potential. Because I knew such a monster lurked under the surface of my being. Caged. Waiting to erupt. Wanting to scare everyone around me. I knew such a revelation would thrill and empower me. The notion first hit at a young age, before I recognized the beast within. Something attracted me to the Wicked…

Maybe I love Halloween because I was named after a dead kid. Maybe my fascination with horror comes from the same root. I think about these things between July and October. Where I’m from in Ohio, summer football practice and Halloween are just plain linked in one big thing we call Fall. This year I’m thinking about those links in a new way, and the links to why we write what we do. Years in, do we know all of our influences? Do we want to? It’s all thanks to a story Dad told me this summer, if not for…

"We find delight in the most loathsome things" -   Charles Baudelaire 'Tis the season for all things that howl, bite and go bump in the night. Grab a pumpkin spice Latte and pull up your reading chair.   Here are a few fun, dark and tasty treats to help you get in the mood for the real most wonderful time of the year. Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne probably already evokes terror in you - just not in the right way. You probably break into a sweat remembering being trapped dissecting The Scarlet Letter in your high school English…

There’s a snapshot of me when I was 10, sitting on a boulder outside of Grand Teton National Park. The picture was taken from the passenger window of our family’s pickup, parked in a long line of trucks with campers on the back, waiting for the day’s campsites to be released. I sat under a pine tree with a hardcover library book open on my lap, irritated to have been distracted from my reading. I was in the midst of discovering Dracula. I’d grown up watching Sir Graves Ghastly on TV on Saturday afternoons. Sir Graves hosted an endless series…

Ghost stories go together with Halloween like “trick” and “treat.” The image of the sheet with eye-holes is as much a staple of the season as pumpkins, bats, and skulls. When horror films invariably possess the airwaves, they usually feature menacing, spirted icons like Candyman and Sadako/Samara. Ghosts typically figure in novels and movies as such supernatural villains, from the vengeful phantom seeking to perpetuate destruction (Kayako Saeki of The Grudge) to the restless wraith demanding closure (Joseph Carmichael of The Changeling). In true-life anecdotes, the role of the ghost is less clear-cut. For one thing, the spirit's identity is…

For some it’s such a strange concept, working in a haunted house where the general populace relates to it as something truly horrific and exciting, something you go to during the haunting season of October to get entertained, where you go with friends and family, walking through narrow hallways and stooped corridors, experiencing strange music and sounds, and then, sprung upon by the freaks lingering in the darkness...that’s where the work comes into play (aside from other things). And I am proud to say I work at one of the best Haunted Houses in South Florida, Enigma Haunt. Being a…

Future relatives are the worse of the bunch when it comes to what terrifies the small and the weak, but just around that corner, a big wheel begins turning, and like Danny in The Shining, that kid spinning those “Big Wheels” comes out on top of the terror. In the 1970’s, blood, clowns, rock stars that painted their faces like evil clowns that spit blood, begat kids roaming the streets being these things on Halloween, and their terror did beget more terror, more blood, more screaming into a mic, but that reaction to something darker isn’t what you’d think. I…

Children of Horror, On this most hallowed of nights, chilling winds howl from hurricane ravaged swamps. These same night winds carry the cry of wolves on the windy peaks of werewolf-haunted Blood Mountain. Twisting torrents of leaves dart and swirl as bats in the waning twilight. They flicker and flash colors of crimson, and golden orange, just as the ghostly harvest moon reaches its zenith. Down in the bayous and down in the valleys, ghastly ghouls, vampires, and wraiths lurk in the ethereal mists of graveyard and crypt waiting to pounce. Many more lurid monstrosities lumber down cobblestone streets tricking…

One of my favorite Halloween traditions was getting or creating a costume. Being a closeted gay kid, it was always cool to pretend to be someone or something else. My earliest memories of costumes were of these cheap ones with a plastic mask with a rubber band on back and a vinyl torso piece that tied on. There were ghosts, witches, vampires, and ghouls and other odd sorts—all generic to buy at a TG&Y, a five and dime store. It was a step up from a sheet with holes cut out for eyes which was the poor kids choice in…

Embracing the chaos might be the journey we take to finding peace. ~ Rachel Hollis   Creative types gotta create.  It’s not just a slogan, it’s a credo for most of you reading today’s Halloween Haunt.  We all find different ways to release the pressure and drive to create; one of the ways that I find satisfaction and pure enjoyment is through papercrafting.  I don’t usually much free time to engage in crafting as I would like, so I appreciate when I find a project that is cute, quick to make, and I can use my stash of supplies —…

I was robbed of Halloween. I’m forty three years old. This shouldn’t be about me. October 31st should be for my kids’ sake. But out of all the creature comforts coronavirus took from me in 2020, I’ll selfishly admit that trick or treating is at the very top of my list. Our two sons are in the prime of their Halloweening. Every year, starting somewhere in the summer, our dinnertime conversations shift to what they’ll dress up as. We try on costumes as if we were getting ready for our own wedding day and I am the father of the…

This was a Halloween full of parties. I, however, was a student at California College of Arts and Crafts, in the sculpture department, not so interested in parties. This Halloween, I created a true, walking, talking monster. It was fun! Back then, I was fixated on the moment when a person sees an unrecognized object—the moment before the brain processes a combination of memories, deductive analysis processes and a range of possibilities. That was the moment I was going for in my art—that moment of awe….and horror! I was home from art college for a Halloween break when my younger…

Well, I suppose I should specify that this is what Halloween was like for me in Green Brook, New Jersey while growing up in the eighties and nineties.  I have always had a connection with horror from a young age, two to be specific, when my parents, for some reason, let me watch the film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, from Stanley Kubrick.  So, every year Halloween was a big deal for me.  It was a time to embrace my love of all things horror, whether it was campy or scary. In elementary school, I remember being Dracula one…

Storms inspired Halloween in a sense. Like witches casting spells under a horrific storm in the middle of the night. Or a ghost only manifesting itself under stormy conditions like most horror and ghost stories specify. Maybe tortured souls only come back under a storm raging violently in the sky. Seeking revenge on those who had burned them alive so many hundreds of years ago. Hunting their accusers hoping that they will feel the pain that they felt all of those years ago.  This poem is an excert from Scattered Thoughts, Volume II     SCARS My scars tell my…

Halloween casts a dark spell on us. October enchants the young and old as spirits roam free. The veil between the worlds is thinnest now. I have a keen and strong interest in the paranormal. I would happily work as a paranormal investigator if I could. I have researched the paranormal as much as I can. I also am clairvoyant and clairsentient. This has helped me to study the paranormal and spirit world. I was sitting with a friend in my kitchen one summer night. We chatted for hours. The night was hot, so we drank colas to keep us…

My daughter has a tote bag printed with the words, My Mom Blogs About Vampires. When you are a parent who writes about the paranormal, horror, and urban fantasy, it is always Halloween, and of course you’re always the cool parent. Back in 2012 I started a blog about parenting middle school and high school kids. Nobody read it, that is until I made it about parenting young vampires, who aren’t all that different from other kids. That said, it made a big difference. Adding horror to anything, including parenting, is not only fun but it brings in readers. Now…

Halloween is that time of year when the veil between our world and the next, the natural and the supernatural, becomes virtually non-existent.  What better way to celebrate, and gather real-life inspiration for some excellent horror writing, than by invoking the paranormal? For centuries, the brave (or foolhardy) have been summoning the supernatural through various rituals, or “games.”  During the Edo period in Japan, samurais used to play a game called “Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai” as a test of courage.  During the game, the players would sit in a room together, and one person at a time would tell a frightening ghost…