Halloween Haunts: How to be Safe in the Cemetery by Loren Rhoads

Halloween Haunts: How to be Safe in the Cemetery by Loren Rhoads   One foggy summer day, I explored the historic cemeteries a mile outside of Pescadero, California. The grass was ankle-high on the Protestant side, but over my knees on the Catholic side. Holes the size of juice glasses riddled the ground, but I never saw a mouse or gopher poke his head out. Where there is prey, there will be predators. I kept an eye out for snakes. When I could, I walked on the graves’ copings. I’d nearly finished my exploration and was headed cross-country down the…

Halloween Haunts: Our Love Story as Told by Halloween by Jessica Hobbs

Halloween Haunts: Our Love Story as Told by Halloween by Jessica Hobbs   As my husband and I approach our anniversary of seventeen years together – an unusually long time for a pair of artists still in their 30s – I can’t help but look back on all we’ve been through, from touring gigs to Hollywood dreams to a broken marriage healed through tenacity and witchcraft, and notice how Halloween tells the story of the people we’ve become.   There are no seasons in Los Angeles. For some, the mild climate is the point of living here, but for me,…

Halloween Haunts: The Ghost with the Ruby, Ruby Lips by Naching T. Kassa

Halloween Haunts: The Ghost with the Ruby, Ruby Lips by Naching T. Kassa   A few years ago, during Halloween Haunts, I shared one of my most favorite scary stories with you. It was, “The Ghost with One Bloody Finger.” https://horror.org/halloween-haunts-the-ghost-with-one-bloody-finger-by-naching-t-kassa/). In that post, I talked about my love of scary stories and how the kids in my small, rural elementary school loved it. I also mentioned two other stories. The first was an oldie but a goodie, “The Man with the Golden Arm,” and the other was today’s story, “The Ghost with the Ruby, Ruby Lips.” I learned this…

Halloween Haunts: Licensing on Halloween by Rosemary Thorne

Halloween Haunts: Licensing on Halloween by Rosemary Thorne   Children are not the only ones going door to door setting up dealings on Halloween. There are sorcerers too, knocking on the darkest gates of all realms to renew their practicing licenses. If you pay the right attention, you will see us running up and down not as cheerful as candy-holders: the endeavours we must carry out on that night are hideous, hair-raising, abominable. Those are the mandates of the Ones behind the veil in its thinnest. I usually take my time to anticipate events and make calculations to have everything…

Halloween Haunts: All The Treats! by Linda D. Addison

Halloween Haunts: All The Treats! by Linda D. Addison   Halloween has been one of my favorite holidays my whole life. As a child the idea of dressing up that one day and going house to house to collect candy was magical. Back then, no one worried about being poisoned or razors in fruit. I felt stronger and magical in costume then in regular clothes. The thin awkward kid who read books all the time and didn’t talk much could become a powerful witch, one of my favorite costumes, and no doubt the easiest for my mother to create, since…

Halloween Haunts: A Halloween Poem by Maxwell I. Gold

Halloween Haunts: A Halloween Poem by Maxwell I Gold     The Castle Ephialtes By: Maxwell I. Gold   A stronghold built at the peak of my contemptuous thoughts; haunted delusions fused together like steel rods composed that most ancient structure built when man’s waning primordia waxed soft under a dim moonlight. Always the keep loomed tall and great, swaying ever so gently in the black muted night, teasing me to approach its haughty gates. Walls climbed treacherously high, bristled tops of cracked stone and chipped marble stacked over one another like forgotten corpses trampled by the feet of armored…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: INTERVIEW WITH A HORROR-LOVING CHILD by Eric J. Guignard and Devin Guignard

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: INTERVIEW WITH A HORROR-LOVING CHILD by Eric J. Guignard and Devin Guignard   I sat down to write this blog post, and—as I do before any writing—I read a bit on the subject matter, what others before me have written about. I wanted to put out something different that hadn’t been covered by other HWA members, and so as I skimmed through the blog posts I noted similar themes, many looking back at Halloween myths and family traditions and sweet memories. Man, I’ve got a lot of those too, and reading of others’ past experiences brought a number…

NUTS & BOLTS: INTERVIEW WITH NOVELIST AND HAUNTED TOUR OWNER JAN-ANDREW HENDERSON

By Tom Joyce While working as a ghost tour guide in Edinburgh, Jan-Andrew Henderson found a spot with all the makings of a real-life horror story – an eerie graveyard, a long-buried (literally) human tragedy on a grand scale, and a vicious supernatural entity called “the Mackenzie Poltergeist.” That served as the inspiration for City of the Dead Tours, which he now owns and has turned into one of the UK’s most popular haunted tours, renowned among tourists and travel writers for its mix of entertainment and historical fact. Jan-Andrew, a multiple-award-winning author and HWA member, did the research and…

Submissions will open next month for the newest HWA members-only anthology!

Submissions will open next month for the newest HWA members-only anthology! SCARING AND DARING ADVENTURES will be an anthology of original fiction stories that draw from the rich tradition of classic works of children's literature and puts a “scaring” spin on the “daring adventures.” These stories will be intended for middle-grade readers and will reference characters, situations, or settings from famous works of literature that are in the public domain (generally pre-1923). The anthology will be edited by Eric J. Guignard and published by HarperCollins in 2025. Examples of stories this anthology could contain include ideas such as: The March…

Halloween Haunts: Thing That Make You Go “Hmmm…” by L. Marie Wood

Halloween Haunts: Thing That Make You Go “Hmmm…” by L. Marie Wood We speak of the dead in past tense and positives. We dress for them in ceremony and as protection. We offer them food, plant trees in their honor, name celestial clusters after them. We ameliorate, machinate, gyrate, lie prostrate in the hopes that we can appease them, calm their souls so they favor us, smile on us… do any and all so they don’t haunt us. But what do they think? Do the dead balk when considering Samhain?  Do they smile at our ignorance to think that we…

Halloween Haunts: A Halloween Wedding in the Cemetery by Denise Dumars

Halloween Haunts: A Halloween Wedding in the Cemetery by Denise Dumars   A remembrance of Meg (Susan) Groeling, 1949-2023   Last October I officiated a wedding between two horror writers: Ashley Dioses and K.A. Opperman. It had a Gothic theme, held in a beautiful forest setting. I’ve officiated weddings in various places, but as yet I have not officiated a wedding on Halloween itself. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t attended a wedding on Halloween. I have attended one, and it was performed in a local cemetery. At midnight. “Old Sunnyside” is the common name for the Long Beach Municipal…

Halloween Haunts: It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year by Lara Frater

Halloween Haunts: It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year by Lara Frater I would like to take you back to a magical time. Before streaming and when few had cable. We only had 7 channels and the extras PBS ones were snowy and British. Where computers meant the Commodore 64, and VCRs were high tech. This was the late 70s/early 80s. Okay, not such a magical time. Actually, kind of a messed up time. If a Gen Xer or Boomer tells you the 80s were the good old days, they are liars. I grew up in a suburb of…

Halloween Haunts: When Taboo Becomes Tradition by Carrie Lee South

Halloween Haunts: When Taboo Becomes Tradition by Carrie Lee South   When I tell non-horror people I write dark fiction, their response is often something like “Why? Don’t you want to think about something more positive?” But then autumn’s cold breath brings crisp leaves and suddenly, everyone “gets it.” Halloween. That most American of all holidays. Once a year, the neighborhoods parade out the fake skeletons and tombstones and we all invite death into our lives for a while. In 1988, as a result of an accidental drowning, my sister died only a week away from her third birthday. Fifteen…

Halloween Haunts: The Facts in the Case of Edgar Allan Poe by Joseph Maddrey

Halloween Haunts: The Facts in the Case of Edgar Allan Poe by Joseph Maddrey   When I moved to Richmond, Virginia in 2021, after fifteen years in Los Angeles, I was disappointed about Halloween. Nobody celebrates Halloween like people in L.A. and I expected Halloween in Richmond to be anticlimactic, so I immediately started looking for the local horror crowd. In September, I gravitated toward the Edgar Allan Poe Museum and decided to embrace my new home by dressing up as its native master of horror on October 31st. Because I’m nothing if not obsessive, I also started re-reading Poe.…

Halloween Haunts: How a favorite holiday (Hint: It’s not Halloween) made me love spooky stories by Nikki Kallio

Halloween Haunts: How a favorite holiday (Hint: It’s not Halloween) made me love spooky stories by Nikki Kallio When my collection of short fiction came out this year—an assemblage of sci-fi, speculative and gothic stories—a family member who read the book commented that she liked it, but she thought it was really dark. “Have you always been this dark?” she asked. It got me thinking—have I? When was it that I began to appreciate stories that reach into the shadows, whether they take place in a creepy house or outer space? The answer: Christmas. While there’s a long and crimson-wrapped…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween on Blood Mountain by Jeffrey LeBlanc

Halloween Haunts: Halloween on Blood Mountain By Jeffrey LeBlanc Golden and crimson leaves fall majestically from the ageless trees of Blood Mountain. As they drift along nearing the forest floor, I watch the wind wisp them up into swirls across the rocky bald, and shadowed crags of Blood Mountain. I smile warmly and place my hand to my brow shading my eyes from the crossing sun. I narrow my blue eyes and furrow my brow trying to trace the track of the turbulent leaf storm as it rolls and glimmers as elfin gold in a late-afternoon sun. It truly is…

Halloween Haunts: Why Write Horror? by Megan Bledsoe

Halloween Haunts: Why Write Horror? by Megan Bledsoe   My mom remembers sitting side-by-side with me in a vinyl green recliner back when I was two years old. She had her arm around me, was cuddling me close, when I suddenly gasped and twisted to look behind me. "What? What is it?" Mom asked. "Scary man pinch me." Mom says that I said those words in earnest as I rubbed my backside, that I was dead serious.  I don’t remember doing any of this, but Mom says that she twisted around in that squeaky recliner herself and looked around the…

Halloween Haunts: Pangangululuwa by Victory Witherkeigh

Halloween Haunts: Pangangululuwa by Victory Witherkeigh   “Did you bring the crispy pata? It was your Tito’s favorite pork dish.” The woman sitting on the gravesite in front of me said. I turn my head, realizing that there’s a teenage boy behind me holding a silver tray covered in aluminum foil. “Yes, of course, Ate!” he said, yelling back as he maneuvered his feet to avoid stepping on the metal grave markers littered through the grass. It must be getting closer to starting time… Car horns and the smell of dark grey clouds of fuel exhaust caused my nose to…

Halloween Haunts – HWA and Halloween-Inspired Horrorky by Paul Lonardo

Halloween Haunts – HWA and Halloween-Inspired Horrorky by Paul Lonardo As a writer whose focus has always been prose, I had never even considered attempting writing in verse. The thought of composing a poem had always been intimidating to me. Just the mention of iambic pentameter makes me break out in a cold sweat. I was of the belief that poetry was something for deep-thinking, brooding, scholarly types who possessed some arcane ability to plumb the depths of the human soul and mortal existence with strings of words that held meaning I did not understand, nor even capable of comprehending.…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: THE RURAL HEART OF DARKNESS AND ITS MONSTERS by Nicole M. Wolverton

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: THE RURAL HEART OF DARKNESS AND ITS MONSTERS   by Nicole M. Wolverton The rural Pennsylvania hinterlands beg for monsters. It’s more than just the setting—sprawling cornfields, more than a few reputedly haunted covered bridges, dark forests, desolate mountains, and sparsely populated towns—it’s that there isn’t very much to do. Boredom breeds imagination. It sure did in my case. I grew up in a tiny northeastern PA town called Berwick, and that is where my monsters were born. That was never more evident than at Halloween. My mom can sew—and one of my grandmothers was a factory seamstress.…