Halloween Haunts: Crossing Over: Halloween and Ghosts by Lisa Morton

Ghosts have become one of Halloween’s most beloved icons, and each October we see them manifest in everything from terrifying haunted attractions to whimsical decorations. Haunted locations boast increased traffic, and ghost-themed movies scare up box office dollars. But were these elusive spirits of the dead always a part of Halloween? The answer is a resounding “yes”. Scholars are divided on whether Halloween derives more from the ancient Irish Celtic celebration of Samhain or the Catholic observance of All Saints Day (on November 1st)/All Souls’ Day (November 2nd)…but both of these festivals involve ghosts. Samhain was the Celts’ New Year,…

Halloween Haunts: What’s Halloween Good For, Anyway? by Matthew Warner

Horror industry laymen offer me a standard observation when Halloween rolls around.  “This is like your high holy day, isn’t it?” Why, yes, Mr. Joking To Cover Up Your Discomfort, when I’m not carving upside-down pentagrams into my 4- and 6-year-old boys’ heads, you’re exactly right.  In a way, Halloween is our “high holy day.”   It’s an important springboard for our family traditions. But it ain’t holy for us.  We’re not religious, so we’re gonna burn, you know.  Wikipedia says the holiday has something to do with Christianity and Samhain, but all we care about is the candy, man.  (And…

Halloween Haunts: Graveyard Horrors by Loren Rhoads

From vampires, plague victims, ghosts, golems, and the gate to Hell, some of the best stories are buried in cemeteries.  These are some of my favorites.  All of these burial grounds are open to visitors. Chinko-ji Temple, Kyoto, Japan (http://cemeterytravel.com/2014/07/02/cemetery-of-the-week-142-chinko-ji-temple-cemetery/) This small Buddhist temple stands just south of Kyoto’s Gion neighborhood. The plaque at its gate says, “Kyōto’s Bon Festival, the Buddhist observance honoring the spirits of ancestors, begins with the tolling of this temple’s bell. The area is called ‘Rokudo-no-tsujii,’ or ‘the place where this world and the other world meet.’” Chinko-ji Temple, founded in 836, was home to Chinese…

Halloween Haunts: Ghosts Of Hallowe’ens Past by Darren Madigan

Hallowe'en never really meant that much to me when I was a kid... well, not when I was a teenager, anyway. I was born in late 1961.  My childhood, as it turned out, was one of above average mobility -- not as rootless as that of a military brat, certainly, but due to the vagaries of my single parent mom's social life, as well as our extreme poverty, we tended to move around a lot.  We didn't cover a lot of geographical distance... I don't think I ever left Western New York State until I was an adult (other than…

Halloween Haunts: Whatever Happened to Mischief Night? by Charles Christian

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the city of Detroit was plagued by Mischief Night or Devil’s Nights riots that saw widescale arson attacks taking place over the Halloween period, kicking off the night before on 30th October). The worst year on record was 1984, when over 800 fires were started. It was Mischief Nights like these that provided the setting for the cult 1994 Brandon Lee movie The Crow. But, Detroit was not the only place that used to have a Mischief Night. Growing up in the North of England, in the 1950s and early 1960s, one of the…

Halloween Haunts: Want Some Candy, Little Boy? by E. F. Schraeder

Halloween offers a perfect time to ponder haunting images and innermost fears, probing the question, what scares you?  The question “want some candy, little boy?” is the stuff of urban legend, though each Halloween the promise of treats sends children door to door taking candy from strangers. By turning to the history of the holiday, we are reminded that sometimes the most frightening horrors involve a treat and a trick. Asking children if they want some candy provokes tingles up the spine, for it rests on a fine point between gift and threat.  Melting the distance between strangers and children,…

Halloween Haunts: Trick or Treat, Smell My Feet, Don’t Give Me Peeps To Eat! by Pamela K. Kinney

When one is a child, Halloween is about trick-or-treating for candy. Treats as in Halloween, and not from any other holiday. Except in 1965, I learn the horror of Easter peeps. Those marshmallow treats in shapes of yellow chicks. We lived in Ontario, California. Friends of mine, Jenny and Cindy, lived with their parents in the same complex as my parents and I did. We had agreed to go trick-or-treating together and my mother would be shepherding us, to make their parents happy. Wearing our costumes and bags in hand, we left the complex after a quick trick-or-treat there. I…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Infects Scandinavia by Michael Kamp

I'm a proud Dane and we are often considered the "Happiest people on Earth". Danes, apparently, live a life of bliss in The Fairy Tale Nation of H. C. Andersen. This is mostly true, but growing up here in the happy, cold North there was one instance in which I envied my distant US brethren with all my heart. Halloween. As a kid, I saw it in movies and sitcoms. US kids had an entire season devoted to the dark and creepy: A celebration of all things morbid. I was so jealous. My love for the darkness came early, but…

Halloween Haunts: Scaring Ourselves Out of Fun and Profit by Donald J. Bingle

Yep, I’m an old guy, so I remember going trick or treating back in the ‘60s (that’s a date, not a temperature) in a housing subdivision in Illinois. The subdivision was plenty big (all pre-fabricated houses; our family watched as ours was unloaded wall by wall from a truck and assembled one day), so the principal negotiation which occurred between us kids and our parents on Halloween was how many streets we could go up and down trick or treating. The limiting factor in such negotiations wasn’t how far we could go from the house (we walked about a mile…

Halloween Haunts: Interview with Mr. Crow Recorded by T. Fox Dunham

Mr. Crow left me his usual calling card—a lump in my neck—inviting me to a follow-up interview at Doylestown Hospital. That night I lay in my hospital bed only sleeping for moments, desperate just to blank out my mind. They shot me up with dilaudid—their opiate of choice for the night—so what follows might have all just been a vivid hallucination. Mr. Crow strolled in at 3AM. This was his time, the hour when he manifested for a short time in the guise of clientele to satiate his loneliness. His presence oozed into the room, leaking from shadow to shadow,…

Halloween Haunts: Horror: Isolation by C.R. Langille

Horror shows its face (or doesn’t if it’s effective) through a lot of mediums these days, be it via television, movie, or my very favorite, books. There are some common themes that you can find with horror regardless of the medium. One I would like to touch upon is isolation. Isolation occurs when your protagonist finds themselves in a setting that is removed from a populated society. They may not have ready access to needed services such as medical, police/security, or even other people at all. Why is this effective? It works because when we remove easy access to help,…

Halloween Haunts: A Little Perspective by James Kendley

I probably wouldn’t have the attention span to write about Japan if I still lived there. It’s just too damned interesting. I tried, of course, but every time I sat down to the keyboard during those eight years, I was processing all the amazing things happening around me every day. I had to be 15 years and half a world away to write the book I wanted to write, The Drowning God, and even then, I needed help to get the proper perspective. First, a little about the book itself: To uncover modern Japan’s darkest, deadliest secret, Detective Tohru Takuda must…

Halloween Haunts: I Don’t Write Horror, It’s Just How I’m Made! by Christopher Alan Broadstone

Hello HWA!  And Happy Halloween 2015!  My name is Christopher Alan Broadstone, and I'm a musician, writer, and filmmaker, as well as being a brand new member of the Horror Writers Association. In the many online interviews I've given over the years I've consistently been asked what has inspired me to write such intense horror?  My instinctual response has always been: I don't write horror, I write Christopher Alan Broadstone stories. Until my first film ("Scream For Me") won "Best Short" at the New York City Horror Film Festival and my second film ("My Skin!") won in the "Best Horror…

Halloween Haunts: On Halloween, The Family’s a Saw by L. Andrew Cooper

TAKE ONE At the end of October, you may approach an unfamiliar door. The door belongs to a stranger. When it opens, you show the home’s anonymous inhabitants trust, revealing yourself in fragile form, expecting a brief moment of hospitality when the strangers might, with equal or greater ease, offer a trick far more permanent. Your trust might astound someone unfamiliar with this custom, practiced by young children in Halloween cultures or—to foil the conceit before it becomes overbearing—by horror writers who dress up their personal nightmares in gore and the costumes of classic creatures to go dancing with neighbors…

Halloween Haunts: The Haunted House That Nearly Killed Me by David Lucarelli

I'm a haunted house connoisseur. Over the years since I was a kid, I've gleefully gone to all the  various haunted houses that appear every Halloween. There have been a few close calls. I remember once catching a full length mirror that threatened to fall over on the people coming through the maze directly behind me. The incident caused the Ghoul in front of me to break character and mutter under his breath to me, “Thanks.” But of all the haunted houses I've ever been to, only one actually threatened my life.  I was on the 8th grade field trip…

Halloween Haunts: Estes Park Hauntings by Damian Serbu

The tradition – whether real or imagined – of ghosts more prominently appearing or visiting the living during Halloween inspires all sorts of stories in my mind. Nothing tantalizes me more, however, than real hauntings. And actual hauntings that touch my family especially fuel my passion for writing about the mysterious world of the afterlife. My parents live in Estes Park, Colorado, and so on a recent visit we went to the Stanley Hotel for a drink and to partake of the ghost tour. Of course, most people know that setting, and particularly room 217, inspired Stephen King to write…

Halloween Haunts: Time for a Bonfire? BYOC by Dave Sakmyster

That would be "Bring Your Own Cat," and for those of us dog lovers out there, the following investigation into this certain ancient Halloween (or Samhain) practice, will bring tears of joy and long-repressed urges to break out the marshmallows and graham crackers. Black cats (like mine) don’t know how lucky they have it today. In the good old times, back when stakes were for more than just securing tents, it was commonly believed that such creatures were the familiars of witches or were the embodiment of evil itself. I favor the latter, having seen what my little monster has…

Horror Writers Association Launches ‘’Alone Is Scary” Campaign

To Support Local Animal Shelters The Horror Writers Association (HWA), the premier organization of writers and publishers of horror and dark fantasy, today announced the launch of its “Alone Is Scary” campaign to support the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ (ASPCA) Adopt-A-Shelter-Dog Month. Starting October 1, the HWA’s successful Horror Selfies website (www.horrorselfies.com) will seek submissions featuring pets in costume, pets “reading” horror, and/or pets with signs supporting local animal shelters. Accepted submissions will be featured on the site and distributed via the HWA’s social media accounts. Previous Horror Selfies campaigns generated nearly 20 million impressions,…

Halloween Haunts: Tradition by Heddy Johannesen

The ancient Celts celebrated the Sabbat of Samhain on the eve of October 31st, marking the Celtic New Year. Samhain means summer’s end, pronounced “samhuinn” (Scots Gaelic spelling) when they protected their herds in the stables and stored their harvest for the cold winter. They feasted, burned need-fires, and divined with the spirits of those departed. I’m a Witch. I enjoy Samhain on October 31 by performing what is known as a dumb supper. During a dumb supper, not a single word is uttered. I lay a black tablecloth on the table and use black dishes, napkins, and cutlery. I…

Halloween Haunts: Hallowe’en Over the Pond By Sara Jayne Townsend

I was born on 24 October – a week before Hallowe’en. Growing up in the North of England in the 1970s, this didn’t mean much – Hallowe’en wasn’t a big celebration. Bonfire Night, falling five days later was a much bigger deal, and we all looked forward to big bonfires, sparklers, firework displays and throwing effigies of Guy Fawkes onto the flames. It was only when we emigrated to Canada – in January 1980 – did I discover the concept of trick or treating. I was ten years old at the time. I only really got a couple of years…