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Time for our second October Giveaway! A couple weeks ago, Amy mentioned the release of the new Barnes and Noble edition of Lovecraft’s fiction – complete and unabridged in one volume! One lucky Hog’s Head patron will find themselves the owner of a brand new copy.
To enter the drawing, you have to submit a comment with a personal Halloween story, joke, or happening – anything will do, really, whether it be something funny that happened to you on a Halloween night, your favorite costume, a scary Halloween incident.
Submit your comment by 12noon EDT on Halloween. The drawing will take place that afternoon.
Good luck!
Joivre on 
Red Rocker on 
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Black Angus on 
Travis Prinzi on 
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{ 32 comments… read them below or add one }
One of my favourite Halloweens was back in my college days, probably late 80’s. This is in mid-Nebraska & we had a blizzard that very day. High winds, icy conditions & lots of snow. So, trick or treating was cancelled & most travel was impossible. But that didn’t keep me & some friends from gathering at the church campus center where I was living as a resident at the time & playing role-playing games all through the night. I can’t remember if it was D & D or Star Trek: The RPG. But anyway, that was one of my best Halloween experiences.
Oh, and of course, watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” is a yearly tradition, too.
One of my earliest memories of Halloween actually occurred after Halloween. I was four or five years old. A boy in the neighborhood suggested that we go trick-or-treating, so we did. I don’t think we were too successful. I remember one lady telling us that she did not have any candy and the boy told her that crackers would be okay. Someone must have called my mother. I think I got into some kind of trouble because of this incident, but I don’t remember what it was.
Well… They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so… Here goes:
Dang. Let us try that again.
Do forgive me, Travis! I am attempting to share a photograph and evidently, my html skills are not up to par, alas!
Here is the link: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v41/Logospilgrim/Halloween/bookworm.jpg
I think my favourite Halloween stories have to do with the costumes I had when I was a kid.
When I was 3, and my mom asked me what I wanted to be for Halloween, there was only one thing I wanted and that was to be…… An Alligator. yes. An Alligator. Not a dinosaur, or a witch or a fairy an Alligator. So my mom searched high and low for any kind of costume that even remotely resembled an alligator without any luck. I refused to dress as anything else, so after working away in front of a sewing machine that she didn’t know who to use, and bought for this occasion, she created me an alligator costume out of forrest green corduroy and white felt for teeth. It was the best costume ever, and I was the only kid I know who has ever been an alligator.
The next year, I thought I’d be a BIT more traditional, so I decided I wanted to go as a Cat….my mom was thrilled…until I said not just any old cat but… a pink cat. I don’t knwo where I got it from but I wanted to be a pink cat. and yet again she made me a wonderful costume.
THANKS MOM!
hehe
To this day, i still like to come up with strange and out there costumes. This year.. I’m being a Popple! made of green fun fur and felt heart shaped ears!
My favorite Halloween story is of my grandmother. I think I was about 5 and she made me an old fashioned (Victorian) style dress for my costume, bonnet and all. It was a labor of love and I still have that costume.
My own daughters also wore it later on as well and it’s in the cedar chest for the day I have a granddaughter to wear it as well.
Wow HP Lovecraft!
I know a joke it’s not that great but here goes
knock knock
who’s there?
hit
hit who?
hit whom
hehe I hope that makes you giggle at least a little
Ha! Tell you what – it’s not a Halloween joke, but grammar freak that I am, it made me laugh. So it counts!
When I was about 8 or 9, I decided that I wanted to dress up as Moses for Halloween. Yes, Moses. I used the beard from my brother’s old Santa Claus costume and made my own Ten Commandments out of cardboard. I even wrote out each of the Commandments. So Halloween comes, and I go out trick-or-treating and am having quite a jolly time; however, I live in Texas, so Halloween is always a warm night. After walking around a couple of blocks, my beard was making me very hot, so I tore it off, ditched the Ten Commandments, and became a Shepherd for the rest of the night.
I’m the only person that I know who has ever gone out on Halloween dressed as a character from the Old Testament… especially a character from the opposite gender!
Every Hallowe’en night, we all dress up in costumes and visit the “old folks” in our extended family. We get homemade fudge at most of the homes.
We almost always come across a flaming roadblock on our drive home, sometimes forcing us to take a detour. I thought you would like this picture of my son in front of one of those roadblocks in 2002.
http://parentingfreedom.com/2008/10/30/halloween-memory/
We thought he looked like Harry Potter.
He is now fifteen and looking forward to winning this book. 
Hope you can send it to Canada where we sometimes have to wear snowsuits under our costumes. 
Last year my wife and I practiced saying “trick or treat” with our (then) 1 1/2 yr old. We told her time and again that she was supposed to say it when someone answered the door. She was doing great until we actually went trick or treating. Never said it once. Hopefully she’ll do better this year.
One of my favorites was back in junior high. I had some friends over, we turned out the lights upstairs and watched ‘The Raven’ with Vincent Price. I was on a Vincent Price kick at the time…and a Poe kick as well. It worked out pretty well.
What has a head like a black cat, feet like a black cat, a tail like a black cat, but isn’t a black cat?
A black kitten.
A Halloween memory of mine is of when, as a little girl, I went to a party with maybe 35 other children (though young memories tend to exaggerate). I went as rainbow brite and won the costume contest and the limbo contest. I was really oddly proud of that sparkly baton limbo prize for years to come..
What a wonderful Lovecraft collection! I’ve wanted it but couldn’t find it except for obnoxious secondhand prices..
Susan, apparently the reason it’s so obnoxiously priced is because it rapidly went out of print & from what I gathered won’t be reprinted.
If it’s still out of print by next Halloween, I’ll offer my copy to Travis as another giveaway.
Halloween is my favorite holiday, even before Christmas. Last year, I was a freshman in college and, strangely enough, had enough time to make my own Halloween costume for the first time. Three friends and I started on the project two months before the day, creating a peacock fairy costume based on the wing designs by Emilie Autumn detailed in her Crafters Coast to Coast interview (YouTube it!). After several setbacks due to the complexity of our design, we ended up creating ten individual wing pieces, with five layers on each side to create an insectoid effect. Each wing was hand sewn and hand painted blue, green, and purple, decorated with sequins, copper paint, gold bells, and real peacock feathers. We made a mask to go with it- peacock feathers with sequins. Finally, on the day of the big debut, my friend painted me head to toe with body paint to match the design of the wings and mask. I went around campus all day in character as the peacock fairy visiting from Under the Hill. It was a huge hit in all of my classes- people even stopped me to take pictures with me as I walked around. This year, I’m trying to top that with a wood dryad costume and mask… but the peacock fairy is still my favorite of all.
Everyone’s posting here has reminded me I haven’t put up the promised giveaway yet.
Maria, that sounds like a great costume!
Remember each year in grade school when you got a new teacher, you’d have to do a little “about me” survey so your new teacher could learn a little more about her students?
When asked what my favorite day of the year or my favorite holiday was, I never said Christmas or “my birthday,” I always said Halloween!
My Favorite Halloween: When I was 13 I spent the day at my best friend’s house decorating her front lawn with cobwebs and fake-blood. We cut up black plastic bags and draped them over some wooden poles, making a spooky path to her front door. When trick-or-treaters walked through the bags we would jump out and scare them. Her dad was in on the fun too!
Now, 5 years later, I celebrate October by trading horror books, movies and music with my friends and on Halloween we continue the spooky tradition.
H.P. Lovecraft’s collection would be an excellent addition to our Halloween fun too!
I’ve always thought that Halloween was an interesting holiday, and not just because it’s a chance for kids to get sugared up beyond all reason. No, I find it fascinating because it’s about fear. Yeah, I know, duh right? But hear me out. On Halloween, we drag our fears into the light. We dress up as the things that frighten us, and seen for what they are, they aren’t so scary anymore. With all the talk of terror in the news lately, and all the things we’re told we should be afraid of, it’s good to take a day to step back and see that the shadows under the bed are just that, and we don’t need to be so frightened after all.
Right on, David, which is why, like Juliet and Maria, Halloween is my favorite holiday.
I miss the old days of putting real effort into trick or treating. When I was a kid- a mere 10 years ago- I would dress as a knight or batman and try to act like my favorite heroes. Once, as superman, I was wandering in search of candy and we went up to this house with a strobe light up and a scarecrow in the seat. My little brother (as batman) and I went up to ring the doorbell. As I went to push it, the scarecrow started moving towards us! I was quite scared, and I attempted to rush this foe to stop him, cuz I was a kid
. Just imagine feeling like you walked into a black and white movie, and all of the sudden THERES A SCARECROW REACHING FOR YOU OH MY GOD RUN! I dunno, I just don’t see that much thought going into Halloween these days.
H.P. Lovecraft is my favorite horror author, because his horror requires that you put yourself in the shoes of a man dealing with situations and beings beyond human understanding or control. I know it doesn’t have anything to do with what I wrote, but thats my piece on Lovecraft.
his horror requires that you put yourself in the shoes of a man dealing with situations and beings beyond human understanding or control
CJ, precisely! Lovecraft said the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. That informed his writing, and it’s what produces a truly chilling effect (rather than the blatant blood and gore in too many attempts at horror these days).
Like several people have said before me, Halloween was always my favorite holiday. But I didn’t even confine it to October 31st. Every once in a while I will just get dressed up in costume for the day for no reason. Once I wore a big pair of Halloween wings down to the playground near my house with a friend of mine about a week before Halloween. We ended up befriending this little kid and hung out there for a while then left. The day was fun but it was forgotten a few months later when we returned to the playground on a snowy winter day. There was a little kid and his dad playing in the snow and as we approach the dad looks up at us curiously. After a moment he asks us if we are the same girls with the wings and, stunned, we said we were. We ended up having a big snowball fight with him, it sounds weird but it was really very fun.
So I guess its not exactly a Halloween story, but it was only from a week or so before . And of course on Halloween we got all dressed up once more and ran around outside, occasionally stopping by houses for candy.
Halloween seems to be every ones favorite holiday, It’s kinda disappointing that once you get older you might actually end up having to DURING Hallows eve. For that reason alone I say we should dress up in fun costumes for all the major holidays (Yes! Halloween is a major holiday for me) but they have to be cool costumes not those slutty ones that some girls wear. (If your going to wear that come to my house *winkwink*)
Hmm lets see an interesting Halloween story… I remember this one time back when I was very young (back before dirt was invented) me and 2 friends figured out that if we brought 4 different costumes along with us we could hit the same house a maximum of 5 times and therefore get a whole lot more candy. The plan seemed full proof so when Halloween night came along we hit the first house and all was going well until the lady noticed our backpack (which we always brought with us when we went back for candy wearing a different costume) So our plan didn’t work out so well but she gave us each a bag of our choice of candy for being smart and coming up with the plan.
I grew up in a small town in England where nobody really celebrated Halloween, but one year my mum bought sweets to give to our neighbours so that my brother and I could go trick or treating. By the time we moved to America I was in the age that’s too old to go trick or treating, but too young to be the ‘cool’ old kids who hit up their neighbours for candy
.
Halloween costumes always bug me because they’re made of really cheap material. Also I was disappointed yesterday because I bought fake blood to be a zombie and found out it has lead in it. =[
I remember the first time I went trick or treating and dressed up as Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. I felt like the costume was missing something so I bought a plastic sword just to feel like the costume was complete. Later that night, I ended up getting in a fight over some candy with my sister who was in a full fairy costume. We battled it out, Mortal Kombat style, using my plastic sword against her magic wand. Apparently her magic wand had the power to bend my plastic sword rendering it useless, so I was forced to give her my candy. Little did she know I used a fatality move to finish the battle and told my parents that she took my candy and my parents gave it all back
.
Further on the theme of cheap costumes: my eight year old’s 3-D skeleton costume is coming apart, and he hasn’t even worn it trick or treating yet. Of course the slit I cut in the mouth of the mask so he could breathe, and the fact that he wore it to outdoor recess at school didn’t help. But at the price that we paid for it, I would have expected the foam applique “bones” to stay stuck on a wee bit longer – say until November 1st. Oh well, in between carving pumpkins and watching the hockey game tonight, I’ll be using needle and thread to restore some structural integrity to Mr. Bones.
BTW, a good substitute for fake blood is corn syrup mixed with the right amount of red food dye to bring about the desired shade of crimson.
Halloween is my favorite holidays. I love black cats, horror movies and long walks on the beach.
Two years ago on Halloween I was dressed up with a ballerina and went trick or treating with my friends Julia,Katie,Haley and Julia. I knew my best guy friend at that time (Boy 1) was going to be a hobo and was going to be with his friend trick or treating in the same neighborhood. My friends and I were walking around the neighborhood getting candy from random strangers. We suddenly bumped into these guys in a banana costume(Rob), a boy in a lime costume (Brian) and a kid that claimed to be an indian(Ashwin). Anyways, we were talking to them for awhile and went back to trick or treating. I bumped into boy 1 and his friend and was like hi. One of my Friends Julia randomly started chasing them and my friend Haley started running after the 2 boys. I was like what the (expletive deleted) is going on!? and kept getting more candy with Katie. We had no idea where Haley and Julia went at the time. Katie decided to cross the road to one house and I decided to follow her. Katie randomly jumps and them I jumped. When I jumped I suddenly realized why she jumped. I had jumped into a ditch and landed on my ankle badly. Katie decided to go find Julia and Haley to tell them what happend while I sat in the ditch. Apparently Katie found Julia and Haley talking to Rob, Brian and Ashwin. Brian said , “I’ll go save her, I’m a boy scout!” and ran to me. When Brian reached me I had gotten up and started limping back to my friends’ house. the end.
Hallowe’en minus 6 hours:
It’s raining. Gale force winds are blowing the ghoul in the ash tree against the branches.
Two pumpkins carved.
Skull mask sewn and taped (used gorilla tape). Will use fabric glue to stick foam applique bones back onto gloves.
Brought home large transparent garbage bags to wear over costumes in case the rain doesn’t let up.
Gorgeous 75 degrees F.
Was going to a party tonight dressed as Hagrid and my three dogs as Fluffy, but I didn’t think I’d get much flirting action with the beard so I’m switching to a shorter version of Madame Maxime. My small dogs and I should be in the correct proportion (and I got a cute black bob wig).