Halloween Haunts: Creepy Cat’s Guide to Entertaining
By Katherine Kerestman
Whether one is an armchair traveler or is infected with the wanderlust, she will occasionally wish to enjoy the pleasures of darkness within her own home. Several festive seasons lend themselves to macabre celebrations and entertaining at home: the summer and winter solstices, All Hallows Eve, Walpurgis Night, and Creepy Kitty’s favorite St. George’s Eve. Creepy Kitty offers her suggestions for an evening of creeping out one’s friends:
St. George’s Eve is the night preceding St. George’s Day. St. George’s Day is May 6 in the Gregorian calendar, although some do prefer to reference the old Julian calendar date of April 23. St. George is traditionally portrayed as a knight on horseback slaying a dragon, symbol of the forces of evil; St. George’s Eve, however, is when the evil spirits are out in force:
It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight when the clock
strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?
the villagers warn Jonathan Harker as he embarks for Dracula’s castle, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and they beg him to wait until the next day to go. This duality of spring holidays is the equivalent of the autumn pairing of All Hallows Eve and the following day, All Saints Day (St. George’s Eve and Halloween are “Fat Tuesdays,” of a sort, for the Evil Things on the nights before the religious feast days of St. George and All the Saints).
The ancient traditions of European agrarian societies evolved from people’s various efforts to defend themselves against malevolent spirits and other evil entities on such dangerous nights. Halloween defensive traditions include Jack-o-lanterns and bonfires. Other protective measures include burying milk to protect the cattle from witches; wearing one’s shirt turned inside-out; sleeping with a knife under the pillow; wearing a hat to prevent a witch from slipping a bridle over one’s head; and placing garlic on doors and windows.
Today St. George’s Eve is a spring Halloween. The Goth set, especially, honor the holiday, and many Goth weddings are performed on this day. Festivities based on Dracula are held annually in Whitby, England, where the Demeter came ashore, bringing Dracula to England. Should the reader feel inclined to treat his friends to a macabre soiree, Creepy Kitty has suggestions. The reader most likely will find many additional horrific ideas in the corridors of her own sinister imagination.
Creating a dark frame of mind begins even before the guests arrive. Invitations should include the relevant quotation from Dracula about St. George’s Eve and a brief explanation of the holiday. Creepy Kitty encouraged a guest at one of her bashes to memorize (before the party) the Gypsy Maleva’s lines from Universal’s The Wolf Man:
Even a man who is pure in heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
and the autumn moon is bright.
The guest was warned to keep her performance a secret. A second guest was instructed to draw a pentagram on her palm, but not to tell the others. At the party, Creepy Kitty provided the “gypsy” with a fringed shawl and a crystal ball and cued her to “read” the other guest’s palm while reciting her lines. Both guests were surprised, as were everyone else, and the performance was a great hit.
Creepy Kitty decorates her front porch with a black wreath and hangs garlic on the door. Inside the house black and red candles are everywhere, tapers and columns. Creepy Kitty puts to good use the paraphernalia she has collected on her annual holidays in Salem – little black cauldrons, witches’ brooms, human-shaped candles, voodoo poppets – in tasteful arrangements. Her Halloween and macabre-themed Barbie dolls serve as centerpieces at her St. George’s Eve socials.
As guests arrive at the door, Creepy Kitty suggests the host gravely intones (with a Transylvanian accent, if she is able) Count Dracula’s words of welcome to Jonathan Harker:
I bid you welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of
the happiness you bring.
On the threshold the host should present each guest with a gothic-style ornate mirror and demand that the guest prove that he can cast a reflection. Creepy Kitty guides each guest to a table upon which a black, embossed Book of Shadows (available where Wicca and goth articles are sold) is arranged with black and red taper candles; she asks guest to sign their names in red ink (betokening blood), as traditionally those accused of practicing the Dark Arts have been said to have signed the devil’s book with their blood (N.B. This book is simply a guest list, for Creepy Kitty’s purpose is to laugh at evil things, not to condone them).
The host should encourage guests to explore their inner darkness by providing a suggested dress code of black, black, and more black. A crystal candy dish filled with Kat Von D lipsticks in shades of black and deep burgundy enhances the vampish mood and makes for a creepy fashion statement, as well as a fiendish party favor.
After everyone has been served beverages, including lavender-flavored water (lavender invokes the spirits) and been seated, the gypsy performance can begin. After the palm reading, guests can take their turns scrying in the crystal ball themselves; your guests will most likely be very creative.
Creepy Kitty has a life-sized gauze-wrapped mummy who comes out for special occasions. Mummy stands guard over a table laden with prizes: tarot cards, incense, books on witchcraft and surviving the zombie apocalypse, vampire fangs, and t-shirts. Guests answering trivia questions win selections from the table. Here are some sample questions: Define “widdershins:”
A Scottish dialect term for counterclockwise movement. In traditional lore from
most of Europe, moving around something in a widdershins direction was unlucky,
and could be used deliberately to curse someone. (Greer 518).
And “breast divination:”
Reading a woman’s personality by the shape of her breasts (Greer 72).
These quotes are from The New Encyclopedia of the Occult by John Michael Greer (Llewellyn 2015), a useful source of information which
Creepy Kitty discovered in a picturesque little store in Salem. Guests who volunteer to read a selection from the book may take a prize. Other prizes will be awarded to winners of the card games that are next on the program – a deck of horror trivia questions and one of scary movie trivia. Creepy Kitty likes VHS tapes for the convenience of stopping them at the scenes she wishes to play: Creepy Kitty plays clips of the witches’ scene around the cauldron in Macbeth, from Lugosi’s Dracula, The Wolf Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon and awards prizes to the first person to name the movies correctly.
Following the competition for prizes, Creepy Kitty invites her guests to take seats at various stations where games have been set up – tarot, board games (Creepy Kitty adores the Dark Shadows game in which players construct a skeleton by pulling bones from a casket and hanging them on a scaffold), Ouija, oracle cards, and pinning the poppets – and the guests rotate among the various stations. Creepy Kitty held an Exorcism at one of her famous soirees: Barbie, unfortunately, had been possessed by a devil – her head was turned backward! Creepy Kitty erected a stake to which she tied Barbie, and she piled kindling at her little feet, to save her soul by burning her body, as was done in the olden days. Creepy Kitty, however, thought of another way to come to Barbie’s assistance: in the company of her St. George’s Eve guests Creepy Kitty performed an exorcism over the doll (she found the Rite of Exorcism of the Catholic Church in Montague Summers’s The History of Witchcraft and Demonology) – and saved her from the devil! Now there was no need to roast the old girl; she looks so cute, however, tied to the stake, that Creepy Kitty hasn’t the heart to release her. To this day Barbie at the Stake remains on a shelf in Creepy Kitty’s library.
By this time the guests will want to relax. Creepy Kitty makes them comfortable in front of the television to watch Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. But first she gives them each a packet of lavender seeds so that they can grow gardens that will attract the spirits to their own homes. And then she gives them each a bottle of garlic tablets to protect them on the way home; just in case the garlic is inadequate, though, Creepy Kitty provides each guest with a bandage large enough to cover two neck punctures and prevent the wounds from becoming infected.
Creepy Kitty hopes that her reader shall derive both instruction and amusement from her guide for entertaining. She wishes that each of us should keep the macabre spirit alive in our hearts every day of the year.
Katherine Kerestman is the author of Cultes des Goules (2025), Lethal (2023), Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (2020), and Haunted House and Other Strange Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2024. Furthermore, she is the Editor (with S. T. Joshi) of The Weird Cat (2023), Shunned Houses: An Anthology of Weird Stories, Unspeakable Poems, and Impious Essays (2024), and Witches and Witchcraft (Hippocampus Press, 2025). More than 80 of her Lovecraftian and gothic poems, essays, and short stories have been featured in numerous anthologies, popular magazines, and academic journals. Katherine thinks Dracula and Wuthering Heights are the greatest books ever written, and she is wild about Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks. Her name is etched forevermore among the inscrutable glyphs of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Dracula Society. She invites her fans to stalk her at www.creepycatlair.com
“Creepy Cat’s Guide to Entertaining” is an excerpt from Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (2020).
