I originally did this for Shellhawk’s October Dreams ghost story marathon: She asked her guest bloggers to write about their scariest ghost story, but since the story that scared me most isn’t really all that spooky, I sort of took a different tack.

I enjoyed writing it, so I thought I might do a few for my weekend NaBloPoMo posts this month. And I’ll start off by recycling content because…um…I’m environmentally conscious and hate to let the electrons go to waste.

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My scariest story isn’t intrinsically all that frightening; it’s an Inuit legend that I happened upon in a book of ghost stories when I was in second grade. Our teacher had assigned us one of the other stories to read–the 70s were an awesome time to be in elementary school–but I decided to read the rest of them as well, and this one just scared the everliving crap out of me. But it isn’t going to scare you because you aren’t seven years old. Probably. So instead of trying to be spooky, I’m going to break it down Myths RETOLD style.

okay so there are these four hunters right
they’re out in the middle of nowhere
and a blizzard starts up
which they somehow were not expecting
despite living in the arctic
and just before they all die of exposure they find an abandoned hut

this kind of thing always happens in fairy tales
people are always finding cottages in the wilderness
or falling into holes next to magic tinderboxes
or being chased into the one cave on the entire planet where Spock is hiding
not that I am bitter about that

so instead of thinking
finding this hut is way too convenient
and maybe it would be better just to freeze to death
they all think SWEET
and hustle right on in

they build a fire and go to sleep
and the next morning three of them wake up and find the fourth one dead
and instead of thinking logically
and yelling HOLY SHIT ONE OF US IS A MURDERER
and refusing to take their eyes off each other
they are all remarkably blasé about this
and I guess stack the body up in a corner somewhere
and go about their business

I don’t know what their business would be
because they are stuck in an abandoned hut
in the middle of a blizzard
and the internet had not been invented
so maybe they just stared at the walls all day
but that is not the point of this story

but the blizzard does not stop
so they have to spend another night in the hut
and they go to sleep
and the next morning only two of them wake up
and they look at the second dead body
and go, huh

this is not normal behavior you guys

so the blizzard still does not stop
and that night one hunter says
welp, two hunters dead in two nights
there’s no pattern there
so I’ll be going to sleep now

but the other hunter is smarter
or has maybe seen more horror movies
and decides to lay down
but only PRETEND to go to sleep

so he lays there for a while
and suddenly sees movement in the rafters
and one of the bundles up there rolls over

let’s stop a minute and consider this
they have been stuck in this hut
with nothing to do
for three days
and there is not just one
but apparently several
mysterious bundles in the rafters
and nobody has considered investigating them
these hunters are made entirely of concentrated stupid

so the bundle rolls over a couple of times
and then a GIANT FUCKING SKELETON ARM
comes out of the bundle
and reaches down
and sticks a finger
into the back of the sleeping hunter’s skull
and pulls out his liver
and then goes back into the bundle

somehow the remaining hunter does not shit himself lifeless
but instead deduces that the bundle contains a giant skeleton
which perhaps is not a hard conclusion to draw
but he further deduces that the skeleton was not buried properly
and thus is sad
and so is consoling itself by eating livers

and a fava bean and chianti joke is way too easy here
so I will simply inquire
why the skeleton thinks that eating livers
will make it less emo

so the hunter waits until morning
when I guess the skeleton will be napping
and then kicks the stove apart
and runs out of the hut
and instead of continuing to run until his legs are worn to nubs
he turns around and watches the hut burn down
and the doorknob rattles for a while
like something is trying to escape
but eventually it stops
which is kind of a shame
because a giant flaming skeleton bursting out of the door
would be awesome

so the last hunter defeats the skeleton
and since the story never says the blizzard stopped
he probably freezes to death
but at least he isn’t turned into liver snacks by eldritch horrors

the moral of this story is to always go hunting
with companions who are dumber than you

It’s a Graveyard Smash – Tutorial for making a cutely gothic hostess apron.

Post Apocalypse/Zombie Slaying Family – Best family-portrait photoshoot ever.

Chocolate Dipped Rats – Spooky twist on chocolate-covered strawberries.

Just a Zombie Poodle – I’m normally somewhat disdainful of elaborate poodle grooming, but I have to admit that this one is pretty awesome.

Spider Clock – This “Along Came a Spider” wall clock is attractive enough to leave up year ’round.

DIY Spike Comb – Easy tutorial for a spiked hair accessory. The same site has lots of other interesting DIY projects as well.

Samuel L. Ipsum – Lorem ipsum generator that spits out Samuel L. Jackson quotes instead of the usual Latin for placeholder text.

Couple Held Hands for 1,500 Years – Rather touching article about two Roman-era skeletons found holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes.

Quoth the Raven – I’ve mentioned Brooklyn Limestone’s wonderful party ideas previously, and this year they planned one themed around Edgar Allan Poe.

Shain Erin – Etsy seller who creates dolls/sculptures that are just all kinds of creepy. The gamut of creepy. The entire spectrum of creepy, including the parts the human eye cannot detect, but can be seen only by bees.

I recently ran across this neat vintage-y print depicting various bat species, which is gothy (hey, it’s bats) but has enough of a natural history vibe that it wouldn’t look out of place in a more mainstream decorating scheme. I decided to dig around for other batty art, and it turns out that there are lots of lovely prints available. (There are also plenty of prints depicting either baseball bats or cricket bats because search engines can’t tell the difference, but that’s a post for some other blog.)

Other examples in the natural history/educational vein include this 1834 print of a long-eared bat and a common bat, this drawing of a Brown Vespertlion, a line drawing of a vampire bat, and, in case you can’t settle on a single species, chart featuring a couple dozen varieties.

If photographs are more your thing, there are several lovely images of individual bats in flight, like this artistic photo of a long-nosed bat with its wings spread or this neat triple exposure of a fruit bat. There are also some great shots of bats feeding on nectar or echolocating, and if you like massed bats this “cloud of bats” and this (very cool) shot of a huge flock flying overhead are particularly striking. There are also scientific illustration-type photos of bat skeletons, like this photo of an articulated skeleton and this unusual black-and-white image.

There are also lots of paintings, woodcuts, and drawings of bats, like Van Gogh’s Flying Fox, Albrecht Dürer’s prints of a single specimen and another in two poses, and this rather country/primitive painting by Anthony Maynard. There’s also The Witch’s Sister, which reminds me of an illustration from a children’s book, an art deco-ish Fledermaus poster, and a neat Russian poster for the Bat Theatre. If you want something a little creepier, check out Thomas Theodor Heine’s print of a monstrous vampire bat draining its victim or this illustration of vampire bats attacking a sleeping girl.

If you’ve got a bare spot on a wall, what better way to dress it up than bats?

Now here is a truly wonderful repurposing of artwork.

The Peanuts Tarot is a riff on the standard Rider-Waite deck, with a lot of clever attention to detail. It’s (for obvious copyright reasons) not available for sale, but the full set of cards can be downloaded if you want to try and print them yourself.

A bit of googling turned up this 2002 BoingBoing post about the deck, where the artist is cited as someone named “Valerian.” His/her long-defunct site had a “Don’t sue me” page which offered this explanation for the project:

An absurd, heretical, really cool view of an ancient ritual of divination… This is a joke. Six-year-old suburban kids enacting adult emotions and situations, breaking them down and magnifying them into hilarious crumbs of childhood experience… ­ tragedy, pain, and measured triumph. With children as protagonists and innocent humor as the disarming tool, the emotions are simplified and magnified (as are the physical features of each cartoon drawing) and the exchanges between the children become both an ironic parody of adult emotions, and an impossibly close and meditative study of them.

Comments on a few other sites indicate that the artist’s plea against lawsuits was unsuccessful, which is a great pity. There should be some Cleverness Threshold whereby stuff like this would be permitted by reason of being really funny.

I like how well the various Peanuts characters and tropes are integrated into the deck, with baseball bats standing in for wands, Linus as the Hierophant, and Lucy as the High Priestess. (I think The Hanged Man is my favorite.)

You can download the deck from scribd if you have a Facebook account; if you don’t, there’s apparently a free trial scribd registration which allows you to download documents free for 24 hours.

(Hat tip to pdq, who finds all kinds of interesting stuff)

I didn’t encounter this site in time to do a pre-Halloween post, so consider this an extremely advance post for next year.

Take Back Halloween bills itself as “a costume guide for women with imagination.”

We love Halloween. We really love Halloween. We think it’s cool that there’s one day a year when people can dress up as anything they want. What we don’t think is cool is that increasingly women are only supposed to dress up as one thing: “Sexy _____” (fill in the blank). Sexy Nurse, Sexy Cowgirl, Sexy whatever.

Their aim is to provide other options, and they’ve got dozens of costume suggestions gleaned from history and legend. Why would you want to be “generic sexy witch” when you can be Ada Lovelace or Lizzie Borden?

Each costume idea page includes a capsule description of the woman it depicts, several reference photos, and suggestions for recreating the costume. Their resources are all no-sew and many are very fast and easy, which is a great boon to those who don’t have much time and/or advanced sewing skills (and, of course, if you have both, their ideas are still a wonderful jumping-off point for crafting your own costume). This means you can put together a costume as easily as buying something off the rack, without the worry of showing up at a party to find six other people wearing the same costume.

In addition to the main site, there’s also a companion blog and Facebook page. Since Inanna, Boudicca, Jane Austen and are all way cooler than any of the store-bought adult costumes I’ve seen lately, they’re definitely worth a look.

p.s. – I’ll be participating in the unfortunately-acronymed NaBloPoMo again this year, so there will be a post every day of November, including weekends. Can you hardly wait? I thought so.

We all have a point around which the year ebbs and flows, and Halloween is mine. Between planning and sewing costumes, decorating, making crafts, arranging visits to the pumpkin patch, trick-or-treating, and celebrating my wedding anniversary, the tide of the year always seems to be either leading up to or leading away from October 31. When the Big Day finally arrives, it hardly seems real.

I hope that all of you ghostly sorts have an utterly splendid holiday. And tomorrow, we start planning for next year.

Rachael Rossman – Artist who does commission watercolor portraits, including some nice Day of the Dead-themed stuff.

Brain Cakes – These jarred cakes with squiggly-icing “brains” are wonderfully revolting. (I’d be tempted to put labels on them like, “Hans Delbruck” and “Abby Normal.”)

Abandoned Crypts – Urban exploration of abandoned cemetery crypts in Belgium.

Monsters in the Movies – Great history of movie monsters written by John Landis.

Cakeland – Artist Scott Hove creates “cakes” and other desserts featuring fangs and disembodied limbs. Yum!

Ossuary Dice – Set of neat 3-D printed dice shaped like piles of skulls. I have no idea how accurate they are as dice, but they look great.

Growing-up for Goths – Interesting article on why goths tend not to leave the culture as we get older. (Hat tip to WitchArachne)

Polly Tights – I like these cute “weeping” tights, but think they’d be pretty easy to re-create with a bit of fabric paint for quite a bit less than £38/$60.

Getting in the Halloween Spirit – I think this is a brilliant idea.

Sparkly Tattoo Tutorial – Easy instructions for making a temporary tattoo from any image you like.

That is all.

(via The Bloggess)

You’ve never had fun until you’ve jerked around and screamed, “It’s got me! It’s got me!” while checking your blood pressure at Wal-Mart.
— MistookMistake

If I had three wishes, I’d first wish that my dog pooped candy corn. The other two wishes would be kind of irrelevant after that.
— AinsleyofAttack

If aliens invade earth, I hope they’re Bacon people. Because then I could totally save humankind.
— Shoebox

Anything related to Halloween doesn’t scare me. What scares me is when I flush someone else’s toilet and the water keeps rising.
— MrFornicator

Disney’s greatest crime is convincing people that Dalmatians shouldn’t be turned into coats.
— robdelaney

BORED? Smile, nod and rub hands together as you enter an elevator. Shout, “THIS IS IT!” Don’t turn around to face the door. Not illegal.
— kellyoxford

My son says he has trouble sleeping through the night for no good reason. So I bought him an evil clown doll.
— shariv67

In a perfect world a “Party Pooper” would be someone who could shoot confetti out of their butt.
— sucittaM

Me: I’m excellent at my job. You’re lucky to have me. Boss: Why are you waving your hand? Me: These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
— Schmoodles

Imagine a child, playing with chicken bones after the family meal, absorbed in his task. The pattern made by the neatly laid-out bones looks a bit familiar, but you can’t place it. So you ask, “What’s that you’re making there?”

The child looks at you and says, in a calm, quiet voice, “It’s me.”

Speaking for myself, at that point I go online and check to see if Amazon delivers exorcisms.
— Underwire, on the Kraken thing

Once again, Pinterest and its “no attribution for you!” tendencies are thwarting me. I ran across these ghostly dresses and this splendid ghostly figure, and whilst I assume they’re the work of the same person I can’t guarantee it.

Fortunately, the latter photo not only had an attribution, it actually pointed to a tutorial that describes how to make a chicken-wire ghost of your very own.

I love how ethereal these look. They’d be splendid tucked into a dark corner of the yard on Halloween, or simply placed in a garden as a year-round decoration. Chicken wire is cheap, so it’d be easy to create a whole menagerie of ghostly figures to keep you company.