Halloween Haunts: Halloween Traditions Come Full Circle by Amber Jourdan

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Traditions Come Full Circle                                           by Amber Jourdan   Traditions of Halloween Growing up tradition has always been a strong and present concept in our home.  It was very important to my mother that she instill tradition into our life experience.  Of course, the holidays were ripe territory for tradition.  Every holiday governed over it's own set of traditions, administering them fairly stringently, not missing a beat until my latter teen years.  As the youngest I saw all of our traditions wane against the rising tide of years.  Fitting as most holidays mark the passage of time…

Halloween Haunts: Tricks Before Treats: Our Halloween Tradition By Robert E. Stahl

Halloween Haunts: Tricks Before Treats: Our Halloween Tradition By Robert E. Stahl   Every October I start dreaming of my favorite annual tradition—scaring the heck out of trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. It’s my favorite thing in the world. Well, except for peanut butter. My husband and I have been doing it for years. We’ve perfected the set up by now. A few weeks before Halloween, we get the yard looking all spooky. Ghosts flapping everywhere. Cobwebs in the bushes. Inflatable spooks lurking near the sidewalk. Then on Halloween night, we go hard. Spooky music. Strobe lights. Fog machines. The works.…

Halloween Haunts: Hounded by the Dead By Heddy Johannesen

Halloween Haunts: Hounded by the Dead By Heddy Johannesen   The supernatural is the last unexplored frontier, as mysterious as the Marianas Trench. The realm of the dead is challenging to explore. One would have to die and then come back to life to be able to report on it. I had a unique experience in my life. The supernatural haunted me, whether I liked it or not. When I was a child in grade school, some mean kids convinced me that Bloody Mary haunted the third stall in the girls’ bathroom. Something was off about that whole red brick…

Halloween Haunts: Against the Fog: Halloween by the Sea By Juno Guadalupe

Halloween Haunts: Against the Fog: Halloween by the Sea By Juno Guadalupe Every October, I make a pilgrimage to Salem. It has become a tradition, not just for the theatrics of Halloween but for the way the town itself seems to breathe history. In Salem, the sea is never far away. You feel it in a creeping chill, in the salt carried on the wind, in the damp cobblestones... At night, the harbor fog drifts in like a costume, covering the streets in something otherworldly. Standing by the coast, you understand why so many horror stories linger in places like…

Halloween Haunts: In Search of Ghosts and Happy Haunts by Cecilia Kennedy

Halloween Haunts: In Search of Ghosts and Happy Haunts by Cecilia Kennedy   I once entered a haunted saloon in town, sometime around Halloween. But nothing really happened. I drank a beer. It was good—cold, refreshing—everything I’d hoped a beer would be, but I was expecting something otherworldly, based on the lore and legends on the restaurant’s website. The Oxford Saloon, established in 1900 in Snohomish, Washington, is famously haunted—all documented online. And I believe it all: ghostly sightings of women who worked in the bordello on the second floor, a policeman who died when a fight broke out at…

Halloween Haunts: Aren’t You Too Old for This? Really…? By James Ryan

Halloween Haunts: Aren’t You Too Old for This? Really…? By James Ryan I remember how hitting puberty meant being told that I was now too old for Halloween. Back in those barbaric days, Halloween was confined to kids. The holiday never went as all-out as it does now, with celebrations back then geared for the 11-and-under set. An outfit from Ben Cooper Costumes, usually one of those horrible (and flammable, we’d discover later) one piece affairs with a plastic mask that would suffocate the wearer if the flimsy thin elastic band actually held the thing in place, a bag from…

Halloween Haunts: Headless Halloween By Steve A. Wiggins

When the first breath of autumn touches the air, thoughts turn to colorful leaves, cinnamon-scented goodies, and pumpkins.  Halloween can’t be far away.  And each Halloween the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow rides.  Most of us don’t stop to think how closely related Halloween and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” actually are.  They grew up together. Many of us in the Boomer generation likely learned about Washington Irving’s classic through Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, or perhaps through the shortened version shown on television, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  We grew up with that scary song, “Headless…

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 Rises Again!

From October 1 through October 31, the Horror Writers Association will host an online event to celebrate the month of Halloween and help horror readers and horror writers connect at the eeriest time of the year. All HWA members are invited to participate in this series of daily blog posts, book excerpts, and more. Halloween Haunts offers HWA members a place to share Halloween anecdotes and stories to connect with new readers, spread the word about members’ new works, and raise the profile of the horror genre and the HWA.  You can find past posts on our Halloween blog: https://horror.org/category/halloween/… …