Halloween Haunts: Meet Joe Pipe by Pete Mesling

Halloween Haunts: Meet Joe Pipe by Pete Mesling

I grew up in a small town in North Dakota. I’d say the population was around 16,000 to 18,000 back then. In a town that size, there aren’t a lot of celebrities, but there are generally a handful of legends, or myths. Joe Pipe was one such legend among my circle of friends. Stories about his past varied some. He’d suffered a horrific injury when he got his leg caught in a power takeoff, according to some versions. Others had it that he’d left his mind in Vietnam and come back something of a husk. Me, I like to think…

Halloween Haunts: Everything I Know About Sadism I Learned From Alfred Hitchcock by Pete Mesling

Halloween is not unlike death itself, I suppose. We know it's only a matter of time before it arrives, whether we want it to or not. It's more predictable than death, of course, arriving like clockwork every thirty-first of October, with its jack-o-lanterns, scary costumes and dry leaves that blow through the moonlight. But it carries with it the same kind of fascination and dread with which we contemplate our own demise. So to celebrate Halloween is to celebrate ... not death, exactly, but the idea of death. The possibilities that death presents us with. There is hope in death.…