Halloween Articles
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the Halloween holiday is the preparation for the holiday itself. Driving around neighborhoods to observe and appreciate decorations is one way to get in the Halloween mood, while another is to visit various cemeteries, graveyards, and burial grounds.
Older communities have a wealth of final resting places for the dead, and at least one with appropriate Halloween ambiance can be found. When a cemetery has been chosen for further examination, ...
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Halloween can be a frightening experience for your dog or other pets. From the constant ding of the doorbell, to the many people out and about, and all the little hands that inevitably reach for him, there are many things aside from ghouls and goblins that can frighten your pup. Compound that fear with the reality that some dogs are skittish or anxiety-ridden, and well Halloween is right up there with fireworks and thunderstorm.
Instead of dreading the day, use the ...
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Update: I've created a Facebook group on this:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=161340510725
If you think this is a great idea, please join our group and send pics of your Halloween party.
Hope to see you there!
Everybody loves the spooktacular good times of dancing to great tunes at their favourite Halloween party. And the lurking lunatics at ScreamingScarecrowStudios are no different - in fact, in order to make sure there is enough dance floor space at our Halloween party we move all the ...
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Are you like me? Does Halloween form the basis of many of your favorite childhood memories? It was absolutely magical for me as a child. Now that I’m a parent, I try to bring that level of excitement to my own munchkins. I’m no craft-happy homemaker (don’t I wish?!) but I do try to piece together some special times during the season. Traditions form the fabric which weaves the happiest, richest holiday memories. I ...
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Almost everyone recognizes that science fiction and horror are frequently used as tools for social commentary. We have all seen many issues argued in distant times and places with a variety of alien and human solutions or non-solutions. Sometimes though, stories are written that can be re-interpreted in ways not intended by the author (or perhaps it is, and that is the joke on us!)
Let us explore, for example, the movie Alien. When I first saw it at the drive-in ...
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I recently had a chat with Lewis Lehrman, professional watercolor artist, teacher, author and Halloween painter who showcases his work at his website Haunted Studio. He has created an incredibly rewarding niche for himself, whereby clients send him images of a house they love or have lived in, or describe a vivid scene they remember. Lew then creates a custom spooky painting for them, complete with a haunting backdrop, pets, hidden ghosts, people and decor.
His trademarked phrase ...
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How to Haunt Your House
By Shawn and Lynne Mitchell
Sometimes, just sometimes, a book comes across your altar that makes your hands go clammy, that sets your heart racing, that makes your eyes go bug wide in wonder. How To Haunt Your House...
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Ah, the orange, glowing, delightful Jack-O-lantern: it’s perhaps the most immediately recognizable image of Halloween. Each autumn, thousands of families within the U.S. flock to farms, vegetable stands and even supermarkets to buy a pumpkin or two (or more!). But a few in-the-know growers avoid the rush by cultivating their very own decorative pumpkins.
How do these home growers do it? Pumpkin growing isn’t as difficult as you may think. All it takes is a little patience, a lot of ...
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There was always a particular order to Halloween activities in my family. The whole family went to Stonybrook pumpkin patch to pick pumpkins. When we were little, my Mom dressed my sister and me in “quaint” calico bonnets to block out the sun. Mind you, it was something like 1985, not 1885. However, we looked pretty cute sitting on the hay bales in the wagon riding out to the pumpkin fields. Once we got home, ...
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My first Halloween with my new husband was actually right before we got married, so technically he was not my husband. To the people of Keene Valley, New York, we were apparently homeless. That would be an impressive feat to pull off in Keene Valley—surviving as a homeless person. You see, Keene Valley is a tiny mountain town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. It is about 80 miles or so from the Canadian ...
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Anyone can go to a haunted house, but only if you lived near Fort Ticonderoga could you go to a haunted fort! There are many legends about ghosts at Fort Ticonderoga, a French and Indian War and Revolutionary War Fort on the shores of Lake Champlain in New York.
The largest and best known battle fought at the Fort was the Battle of Carillion on July 7-8, 1758 during which the British, with more troops and supplies handily ...
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Editor's Note: Recently, we were startled by the visitation of a black-caped D.J., ghoulish in nature, and we thought for sure we were finally done for. However, he stood upright, his mouth turning to a wry grin, and he snapped his long fingers. A funky-sounding Halloween song suddenly began to play through a slight, autumn wind that blew from behind his cape. We began bobbing to it, and thought it a great addition for any kid's Halloween party. Here we ...
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Halloween comes but once a year if you're a non-haunter, but that's not us! We love to listen to our beloved Terror Syndicate CDs all year and for every occasion - unless my family threatens to put me into one of my own coffins. One day I got to thinking - were there other types of Halloween or haunting music I might be missing? Was there better party music for my next bash that I'd never heard? ...
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If you enter a class to see a disheveled professor teaching you the proper way to cut into bodies with a blood-stained chainsaw, chances are you are an employee of Universal Studios Hollywood. (If not, run!) Along with calls for zombie go-go dancers, Chucky puppeteers and zombie dancers, you know you are in for more than a trick or treat come October 5th at Universal Studios Hollywood. Freddy, Jason and Leatherface are joining in the carnage known as "Halloween ...
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by Sheila Wheeler
Ding Dong.
“Trick-or-treat!”
So begins the yearly procession of witches, vampires, movie stars and super heroes visiting door to door in search of candy and cookies. As with most traditions, trick-or-treating has evolved over centuries and is likely to continue to do so.
Kids’ holiday? Good reason for both adults and kids to get dressed up? Satan worship? Halloween and trick-or-treating have been considered all these things. It is the only day of the year when we give free food to ...
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By Rochelle Santopoalo
On October 31, 2003 the well-worn adage by Thomas Wolfe - "you can't go home again" - proved to be incorrect. For on that day, accompanied by two of my grade school classmates, I returned to my roots and attended the annual Halloween festivities at my childhood elementary school, Glenwood Grammar School in Waukegan, IL. The experience was surreal. Allow me to share my story.
Like nearly all the adults I know who love Halloween, my love for ...
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By John Pearson
It was more than 20 years ago that Bob Burns and his crew of Hollywood FX masters magically transformed his quaint home in Burbank, California, into a haunter's paradise. This past Halloween, they resurrected the tradition one last time hoping to dazzle guests once again with a final show based on the 1951 film "The Thing."
Bob began haunting his home 1967. Tired of hearing true horror stories of razor blades in apples and poisoned candy, he and ...
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When you start with a chilling upstate autumn evening and add in the mausoleum cold that entombs the imagination of a ten year old boy on Halloween, you can be guaranteed to hear the sound of chattering teeth at some point during trick or treat night.
The October 31st tradition my brothers, sisters and I stuck to was as follows: we ran home from school as fast as possible to scare up the costumes that had been haunting us every night ...
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Russ and Pam Leno, Sleepy Hallow Master Pumpkin Carvers, are pumpkin sculptures extraordinaire as witnessed by their sculpting of this massive 1,262 lb pumpkin.
We first discovered the Leno's last year when we featured them in "Halloween Goes Patriotic" in Happy Halloween Magazine (Vol. 4, Issue 4). They carved a 912-pound pumpkin depicting the Firefighter Memorial for the Washington State Fair in Puyallup last September.
During our interview we discovered that they had sculpted yet another larger pumpkin in 2001. Entitled "Geneva's ...
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Book Review
By Anne Broyles
Halloween deserves it's reputation as the holiday that welcomes everyone as shown in this beautifully illustrated and touching book set in the 1930s.
For Anya, Dasha, Irina, and Diminitrii, newly arrived to this country, Halloween seems a wonderfully strange and exciting holiday. They enlist an upstairs neighbor to help with their costumes, and Papa agrees to take them out trick-or-treating. But when Papa comes home sick that evening, it looks as though the children will be watching the ...
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