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What's your Halloween story?
Have you been properly spooked? Did you acquire a fear of a procession of mummies coming to pluck a hair from you each night to teach you about conservationism?
Do you have any annual traditions you follow? Haunted houses, straw mazes, or cider making? Do you or an acquaintance go all-out with decorating?
Do you have horror movie marathons? For fun, or to put on your Mary Shelley hat to look at horror as capturing a zeitghost like Them! for nuclear war, slasher films for rising crime, or Us for class issues? (Leprechaun's bi allergory is an outlier)
Do you have a favorite costume, or future costume idea? A shambling uncanny valley girl, group human obstacle course, ensemble of 3/7 dwarves, or reverse trick-or-treat grandparent?
Yep. My wife, lucky man that I am, was the "witchy, spoopy, gorgeous goth girlfriend" that I had the privilege to make into my "witchy, spoopy, gorgeous goth wife" In the attic we have, at present, one box of Xmas decorations. We have four crates of Halloween decorations. Which, due to some trimming of the collection this year and clearing out some space to make some of the seasonal decorations just part of our overall motif, will probably remain stable at that count.
In this house All Hallows' Eve/Halloween/spoop isn't a day, it's a way of life.
Two traditions.
Ah, that's so cute! Did you have spooky decorations/cake/outfits?
My partner loves Halloween (and I like it a lot, too!). We never had an official first date, so eventually we made our anniversary the first full moon in October. We (well, mostly my partner) didn't want to take attention away from Halloween by making it our anniversary. 🤣
Decorations and cake yes, we stopped just shy of requiring/requesting outfits for everyone. Partially because her family is pretty conservative and it would have been a "whole thing" to ask and partially because we held it at our former home that we were renting as it was nearly empty because we had bought a house and were moving in three days later so everything non-essential was packed or non-accessible.
Rented tables and chairs, got cheap decorations from party stores/dollar stores, had a friend of ours that runs a restaurant cater a range of tamales as food and I filled several tubs with ice and bottled beer. Bluetooth soundbar played all the usual Halloween songs, a friend of ours was the officiant.
That's a nice way to choose an anniversary! We don't have children so Halloween is just a day we can do whatever we want, so we did.
What a fun collection of questions! I love Halloween!!!
Yes! We have a historic lighthouse near us that is usually closed to the public, but on Saturday night the two weekends before halloween they have a spooky fundraiser where you get to visit the site after hours. They take you up at sunset (it's on top of a pretty good sized hill) and tell you the stories of all the deaths and ship wrecks on the way. We then had a brief tour of the lighthouse and as night set in and as they led us away a few men dressed as light keepers took to the top with lanterns (like ghosts carrying on their work from the 1890s). From there they had a haunted house set up in the old living quarters (that were themselves slightly falling down anyway). It was a lovely way to kick off the season!
Big decorations, some sort of fermented beverage, and spooky movies. My partner and I really enjoy decorating the house up. We have a big spider and tons of webbing out front, a collection of jack-o-lanterns from the garden, and a scarecrow man I've set up next to our front window to mess with the trick-or-treaters. We get like ~300 kids a year so it's always fun. We have fun boozey/non-boozey options for the parents as well. Last year I made apple cider, this year I made tepache. It's a fermented pineapple drink, at about 4% alcohol and carbonated. Two thumbs up for how it came out this year. Lastly, spooky movies.
Last year I was a boat and my partner was a dead whale (one had washed up on shore and stunk to high heaven all summer and become a local celebrity). I had found my costume over the summer where a grandmother was giving away a parade costume she had made for her children in the 90s. It was awesome but a little hard to maneuver inside of parties - it was about 5 feet long and 3.5 feet wide. I wore a yellow rain slicker to complete the look. This year I'm using an old, 6ft collapsable children's play tunnel from ikea and tule from an old tutu to be a sea anemone. I hooked up a climbing harness to hold it above my knees when I want to walk around normally. My partner decided to go as the Rainbow Fish from the children's book making it a solid combo again. A big shout out to one of our neighbors who spend a month growing out a beard that he trimmed into the most perfect late stage Elvis chops I've ever seen.
I decorate my house with a number of life like effigy's in addition to the usual red lights and gravestones.
The effigy's look real enough at night, so people are afraid of a jump scare from real people.
A number of people simply nope right past my house.
Normally my wife hands out candy.
She opens the door, and tells people it's ok, they are not real, don't be afraid.
This year my wife is taking the kid trick or treating, so I am handing out the candy. I have no mercy.
While I never grew up celebrating Halloween, I am now firmly of the opinion that you have to earn the candy by facing your fears.
Once my brother and I were too old for trick-or-treating, my dad started a tradition of grabbing a pizza and renting a movie for us to watch. Then somehow watching "Clue" became our Halloween tradition. Love that movie so much to this day.
Now that I'm older and have kids of my own (toddler-aged), we're making our own tradition. Two years now we've gone to my parents' place and trick-or-treated around their neighborhood. The big attraction there the one house in the neigbhorhood that just goes all-out with their decorations. This year the theme was Diagon Alley from Harry Potter, so they were giving out little toy wands at a small Olivanders made of pallets and plywood.
Then my mother-in-law watched the kids for a few hours so my wife and I could go to a screening of Beetlejuice at the local theater. That was a lot of fun.
I have a spooky story.
Back in the 1980s, when my parents were together, they used to have a beach house. We didn't go there very often, so they had a Caretaker. He often slept in our beach house when we weren't there, as well as in other houses he took care of. It was kind of a dangerous job, robberies were common in the off-season.
Long after my parents sold the house, on multiple occasions, we heard the Caretaker screaming at our house (not the beach one) demanding to be paid. I can vouch that I heard it myself. AFAIK we didn't owe him any money, my mother went looking for him anyway. She was informed that the Caretaker was murdered years ago. Shot in the eye.
We don't have Halloween in my country, hopefully this wasn't too heavy. If it is, please let me know. I'll delete it, no problem.
I don't think it's too heavy? If anything, appreciate you opening the thread to spooky things outside of Halloween, for the international members.
I'll share one with an easier resolution. My mom believes she's had prophetic dreams since she was a child, sometimes going to the scene of a crash before it happened. When I was young she had a dream of seeing a white car with no driver that kept recurring, over and over. One day she spotted the car from her dreams, and, sure enough, she couldn't see the driver. I forget the details, but I think she trailed it for a while before she finally got the angle to see that the reason it looked like there was no driver was because it was a foreign car-- they were on the other side.
If you believe in this sort of thing, you might say that the dream made your mother deviate from her usual trajectory, possibly avoiding a crash herself. Under that interpretation, the story is still supernatural, but a bit less spooky :P
this church I used to go to owned this cool cabin in the middle of no where. This is around 96 or so. We'd often go up there for Halloween.
We're all hanging out and suddenly theres this big 'AAAAAHHHH!!!!!' and a bang and this guy comes running to the back of the cabin where the fire is. He's freaking out saying that someone is over there and tried to attack him etc -- so, for some reason, we all jet into the cabin and go upstairs.
So this is all fun and scary etc.. except, when we're all upstairs and totally still, this little bell starts to jingle and it brought on a legitimate fear, since there's nothing that should be ringing.
It turned out that there was a bell above the stove that was hanging by a coat hanger or something and our running upstairs go the thing wiggling, but it wasn't until we were silent that it got up enough gusto to ring a few times.
It was pure fear for about half a minute, then it was all good. I wish I could experience that for the first time again.
About 15 years ago, I was out on the night of Halloween, just living my normal life. When I got home the next morning, I found that my front gate had been egged.
I was out last night, but my housemate was home. The teenage boy across the street had a party which was winding down when I got home around midnight. Earlier, some other group of teenagers was being loud and disruptive on the street, ringing doorbells and then running away (when my housemate confronted them, they drove away, so they weren't locals).
Those are my only Halloween stories.
Mostly, I've been able to avoid dealing with this annoying "holiday" so far, but I suspect it will only get worse as the years go by. Halloween wasn't a thing when I was a child, but it's becoming more popular here now. And, as the only holiday which expects participants to go around annoying their neighbours, I'm sure I'll have to deal with it more and more in the future, even if I don't participate.